2002-04-28 13:56:50 +00:00
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About the Smart Boot Manager image
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2002-05-04 13:25:03 +00:00
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The file `sbm.bin' that is available in this directory may be useful
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to you if you are not able to directly boot the first CD because your
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BIOS may be too old and may not support ISOLINUX.
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Then, instead of booting on the CD directly, you create a Smart Boot
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Manager floppy image by using the sbm.bin disk image. You can create this
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floppy with rawrite (under DOS) or with dd (under Linux). Now you can
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boot on this floppy disk and it will detect your CDROM and let you boot
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on it bypassing any BIOS limitation.
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What is SBM ?
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Smart Boot Manager or briefly SmartBtmgr (SBM), is an OS independent
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Boot Manager - a program that is loaded by the bios before any
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operating system and allows you to choose which operating system to
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boot.
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SBM is included in Debian in two ways, the package bmconf allows us to
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install and configure an old version of SBM and sbm wich is the latest
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version of SBM with an installer.
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What's the use of SBM on the CD then ?
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SBM includes an IDE driver that allows us to boot the cds even on
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machines with a BIOS that wouldn't support booting from CD, provided our
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CDROM is an IDE one, that is, so you can make a SBM floppy and boot from
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it and then tell it to boot from your CDROM.
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Also, there are some cases where the BIOS would allow booting from the CD
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but isolinux fails to boot from there, in this case you can either boot
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using a CD other than the first, as the others don't use isolinux, or you
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can make a SBM floppy and boot from this floppy and then tell SBM to boot
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your CDROM.
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How do you make a SBM floppy ?
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If you have SBM installed on a box you can run sbminst. Otherwise you can
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put the sbm.bin floppy image that we provide with our cds onto a floppy
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just like you would do with a rescue image.
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