Just booting tips

[saikee]

(1) AFAIK VMware, or the free version that I run, is just a mangement layer inside a host OS which can either be a MS Windows or a Linux. Thus you just boot to a Windows or a Linux and VMware is just a program inside.

When you call up a guest OS inside the host, by VMware, there is no real booting involved. The guest OS does not communicate with the outside except with the host, at least that is what my free version behaves. Many functions of the a guest system are not activated by VMware and booting is one of it.

I haven't tried other virtualizers yet.

(2) AFAIK Legacy Grub can be put in a floppy, USB device, CD, DVD, internal hard disk or external hard disk. You can also install Grub lagacy without an operating system attached to it. The best bootable media for Grub, apart from a floppy, is the CD. This is because neither a CD nor a floppy upsets the hard disk order. When using a USB flash drive to boot that drive becomes the 1st bootable disk and forces all the other disks go up the order by one.

(3) You can boot up Grub in any USB device and use it to boot other systems in any other media (except CD and DVD), but do take note the disk order as mentioned in Item (2) above. I have not gone into Grub 2 yet.

(4) I don't think encrypted partition will work with either Linux boot loader Grub or Lilo. Grub and Lilo need to be able to read the partition in order to load the kernel and initrd files. This is if Grub boot a system directly.

However when booting indirectly Grub can boot any other boot loader if it conforms with the PC standard and resides in the boot sector. All MS unencrypted systems do that but I have no experience with the encrypted partitions. I got the feeling it will work as the boot loader doesn't get encrypted because it is never part of a filing system and always stored in a binary format.