"[Bug 1360]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Like I said, I don't know much about the bootloader. If the info's not in the > MBR, where is it? I'd imagine the MBR points to the info, which is contained > within one of my partitions (the most recently installed I'd imagine). So at > the point it goes to write the MBR, it could mount the other partition and read > it, then *add* the entry, then write it back out and unmount?
in theory, it *could* be done. in practice, it's *hard* > > And yeah, you've got a point about sucking the data out prior to formatting, > especially when reinstalling to the same partition (so far I haven't done that, > I've just been installing various distributions to separate partitions). this could be done and is not too hard. the main drawback is to re-use an existing configuration that may be fucked-up. Handling those cases is very delicate. And someone you want to re-install don't always want to keep broken old things from before. a solution would be to prompt to keep the previous configuration, at least the "other=..." entries. > I'm going to reopen this because it's very bad behavior to step on other > installations. Microsoft does that every time; Linux should be better behaved. > (I realize there are other options, but "newbies" (like me) just put it in the > MBR each time.) when you go the install way, but you want to keep some part of the existing configuration, you open a can of worms :-(
