Hallo, Sky.
Y'know, I got to thinking over bigpup's remark about your 'strange' partition set-up.
He's right in that computers do indeed like to see the first partition, flagged 'boot', at the very beginning of the drive.....right after the 512kb MBR sector. But, here's a thing... Take a look at my own partition layout for the big Compaq desktop:-
That large, first partition is labelled 'DATA/boot'.
My first Puppy in the kennels is on the
second partition. Sda5 has two Pups in sub-directories, as does sda10.....which is mainly another data partition, but which has plenty of spare room on it.
I used to have XP installed on the first partition, quite some time ago. Since scrapping XP, it's been doing duty as a data partition.....
but (and this is the point), it also has Grub4DOS installed to it.
I was thinking about this myself, back when I changed the usage of that first partition. Sure, your hardware expects to find a bootloader in that location.....but it's only convention that there should be an operating system
in the same location. I have never, ever, anywhere on the web, found categorical statements by
anyone that say your bootloader and operating system
must be on the same partition. It
is purely convention.
The idea being as follows; to get things working correctly with a set-up like yours, simply create a tiny partition right at the very beginning (no more than 5-10 MB), flagged as 'boot'.....and use that partition to install just Grub4DOS to. And
nothing else. Which then tells the system where to expect all your Pups to be.....and with Pup's versatility, they truly can be
anywhere.
We're creatures of habit, we humans; if something has become widely accepted as the 'norm', or 'standard' way of doing things, we don't tend, very often, to think 'outside the box'. I'm a great one for lateral thinking, with the result being that my set-ups are often unconventional, yet at the same time, still technically 'sound'.
Thus, they
work.....when, going by all
conventional approaches, they shouldn't..! And this Forum, populated by an amazing bunch of people, contains more than its fair share of lateral thinkers... Which makes it such a great place to simply 'hang out', of course.
Mike.