Boot floppy

[Monty J. Harder]

On Wed,  6 Sep 100 21:42:30 -0400 "Ben Webb" <brwebb at transmuto.com>
writes:

> Yes.  It works just like NT 4

  I must confess that I haven't used NT enough to understand such
nuances.  Apparently lilo and its bretheren can't be educated on how to
boot NT.  For some reason, Boot Magic is able to do it, or so Power Quest
claims.  [checking docs]  Yep.  Sez here that NTFS partitions have boot
records just like FAT.  Why wouldn't lilo be able to hand off to an NT
boot record, and let it do the dirty work?

>   Boot floppies are a pain in the butt.  Except on a firewall where 

> in what way are they a pain?  I use them on two computers (a laptop 
> and a desktop) and I have had excellent performance.  It allows me 

> to easily switch kernels, try new things etc... while never having 

  And they're fine for experiments like that, but for a stable
configuration there's no reason to have to pull out a floppy.  I set my
BIOS to boot from the HD (as Brian suggested in this thread) because it's
more difficult to catch a boot virus that way, not to mention a bit
faster.  If I must boot a floppy, it's OK, because I can just tell Boot
Magic to give me lilo, and then it's set up with "floppy" as an option. 
But for most people, booting from a floppy requires resetting the CMOS
before the boot, or giving up that protection (I once got a utility disk
from a consultant with a boot virus!), either of which is not attractive.

> degredation or disk switching.  I'm not sure I understand the part 
> about write protection, I'm booting from floppy and my partitions 

  I consider the ability to physically write-protect a floppy a =feature=
of a micro-distribution firewall like LRP.  No crackers can reach out via
the net to mess with that.  But if you have a hard drive, and such
security is not an issue, why not use the thing?
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