2010/9/5 Eric Kohl <eric.kohl@t-online.de>

Hi!

Being cooperative was my intention when I wrote this part of usetup. The bad thing about this approach is that usetup needs to deal with all kinds of different situations that developers cannot even think about. The only proper way to fix this situation was: "Don't touch it if you don't know how to deal with it!" The result was that usetup could only handle empty harddisks and Windows boot managers correctly. Except for these two cases there are lots of different situations that a setup application cannot deal with. That's where the user must fix things. That's why usetup enables users to save the bootsector to a floppy disk. This enables them to fix the unknown situations themselves. Unfortunately this means that newbies might not be able to install the bootcode properly. But I thought it was better not to overwrite a bootsector that to unintentionally damage a system.

The question how to handle this correctly is a difficult one. Microsoft chose the easy way as they behave like they are the owner of the system and overwrite everything as they see fit. But implementing this part of the setup in a way that fits everyones needs is a very difficult task. Just think about the different filesystems and different versions of LILO and GRUB and what about other third-party boot-managers...

Regards,
Eric

_______________________________________________
Ros-dev mailing list
Ros-dev@reactos.org
http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev