Originally Posted by
BigLar
My brain and some old Peter Norton books. Certain files have to be there in order and that should be enough.
Uh, no. That neither should be nor is enough today -- it only ever was for media formatted by DOS because those always had a DOS boot sector. You also need a compatible boot sector (and potentially a correct partition table, and a master boot record, depending on if the USB stick is formatted with partitions or not.)
Windows can't format a USB device to be bootable out of the box, and and given that most versions of DOS don't speak USB, putting it on via the traditional DOS way (format /s) is unlikely to work.
There are a TON of tools you can use; being a Linux guy, I like to use GRUB to make bootable USB sticks[*], but if you want more of a pure DOS one you might look at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxboot/ or
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ or
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-mu...t-usb-creator/
[* my keychain has permanently a USB stick with the Windows 7 installer, System Rescue CD, CloneZilla, and an old SuSE livedvd image -- which I really should upgrade to Fedora. I assembled it manually, but it would be possible to use YUMI of the ones up there to do something similar. ]
Because I don't care enough about it at this point to delve into it. I just want to be able to boot whatever OS I want like I've always been able to do.
You're putting method ahead of results. "Booting whatever OS you want" is presumably something you're doing to achieve certain results, rather than being an end in itself... no?
Tweaking them for maximum whatever is not high on the priority list.
Dealing with the hassle of running archaic OSes directly on modern hardware, and dealing with dual-booting (or triple-, or more) is a great deal MORE "tweaking them for
something" than dealing with a 2nd (or 3rd) OS under virtualization.
Which is fine, if you like the former, and it suits your actual needs.
and I'm so 1960's
If you were 1960s you'd be IPLing with switches on the front of the machine and loading the OS off giant tapes.
"UEFI eliminates the old-fashioned BIOS", followed by "UEFI runs on top of the BIOS". Hello?
Poorly written, although both can be true depending on how the individual machine is implemented.
The purpose of the BIOS is to provide a standard interface for the user software to access the hardware - the board-specific BIOS handles the details so you can write software that will run on any machine without having to customize it.
The original IBM PC BIOS was a relatively poor job of that even on the original generation of PC hardware; it provided a minimal level of abstraction which was adequate for PC-DOS/MS-DOS, but which had to be subverted for TONS of software pretty much from day one -- which is a big part of why there was more to IBM compatibility than just the BIOS.
Indeed, that's the difference between a half-arsed OS like DOS (which does not offer an common abstraction supporting a great deal of the hardware on the machine) and a comprehensive OS like Linux or Windows NT (where there are standard APIs for pretty much all the common sorts of hardware.)
Even under DOS, the prevalence of DOS extenders and Windows 3.x that went around the BIOS to get to disk (the one function the BIOS
These days, the BIOS exists
purely to initialize enough hardware to boot into another OS, and to support a recovery environment. It's adequate for that, but it's still a very early 1980s design with a whole ton of weird kluges on top.
I believe this function is still required.
Sure.
The subset of that function that's actually required in firmware (a lot of what you described is better served by the OS, and is not in either BIOS or UEFI) is still served quite well by both.
UEFI is just adapted for modern hardware, and offers a (modestly) higher level of abstraction and service level to the software, rather than requiring compatibility with a 30+-year old 16-bit design
(As an aside, there have been several earlier attempts like EISA, MCA, and ABIOS ... none of which caught on.)
All standard PC compatible UEFI implementations include "legacy support" which is basically a BIOS; for some others, where the basic software is PC compatible, you can always load a BIOS as a software application -- which is as I understand it (not clear if this is correct) how Boot Camp works on the Intel Macintoshes.
The end user ('the great unwashed') couldn't care less about how it's done.
Indeed. Of course, most end users can't care less about the infrastructure of their OS either, and just care that the UI is to their liking, will run their software, and won't crash.
I suspect that 95 out of 100 people I would ask would never have heard of UEFI (unless I was asking at a Developer's Conference or something).
Probably not, but most enthusiasts/hobbyists -- let alone IT professionals -- who would make the effort to do their own installation their own OS these days on hardware new enough
Bt the way, I think it also makes a nice, juicy target for hackers and virus writers, too. No need to write OS-specific malware - just get into the UEFI code and you can do your dirty work without any OS even running. This, I understand, is a 'feature' of UEFI. Just sayin'.
Uh, dude, ever hear of a "boot sector" virus? Been around since at least the late 1980s? That's in essence a BIOS virus. VERY old news. Meanwhile, UEFI is less insecure than the BIOS, although that's neither saying very much nor that it's in any practical sense "secure" -- unless secure boot is enabled, in which case it's MUCH more secure (although it's a great deal less convenient to install a non-"blessed" OS, as you need to understand a bit of public-key cryptography from the "generate a key and sign files" level... not that hard for someone who can handle PGP or SSH, but not for the novice.)
Meanwhile ... there is apparently still a healthy market for third-party boot managers out there, and my specific questions were -- what do you do (you answered) and have you used EasyBCD (still no answers).
Sorry, thought I'd said; no, I've never used EasyBCD, and when I've run into references to it in passing it's been as a tool to repair broken Windows boot manager entries not for intentionally setting up multiple OSes.
--
BTW, you might look into SysLinux rather than GRUB. Slightly lighter-weight, slightly more DOS-like. Both SysLinux and GRUB can use a DOS partition as the bootloader partition, rather than an ext-whatever Linux one. Would not be my preference (running Linux being very comfortable, and the file system reliability is much better), but if you're more comfortable with DOS-based tools, might be a little more maintainable for you.