With Git one can easily hop-skip-and-jump between branches.
So I use Git for my local repos and make use of this easy branching.
Because SVN can only handle lineair history, these branches had to be
rebased before committing them to Netlabs. So, this commit contains a
multitude of changes which makes it a bit hairy.
o Display LVM drive-letters in the main menu
A populair request was to show drive-letter information in the menu.
Drive-letters however, are OS specific and AiR-BOOT cannot
accurately predict what drive-letter other operating systems would
assign to what partition. eCS LVM drive-letters however are stored
in the LVM-record and can thus be displayed.
o Added 'Show LVM Drive Letters' option in SETUP/BASIC
This will toggle the display of LVM drive-letters in the main menu.
By default this option is enabled.
o Show popup message when BIOS INT13X extensions are not available
The system is halted.
o Show 'DEL to Power Off' in the bottom left corner
This tries to power-off the system, but it may not work for you.
o Simple interactive debugger
Outputs to the serial port with a few one-letter commands to dump
internal tables and state. (Only available in debug builds)
o Enhanced drive-letter feature
Enable multiple eCS installations using the same drive-letter.
This makes it possible to clone a system with the command
'XCOPY /h /o /t /s /e /r /v /e' to another drive and have that boot
from the same drive-letter.
(Or installing to the same drive by hiding the other system)
o Reduced MBR protection-image from 1024 to 768 bytes
Luckily the MBR Protection Image code does not exceed 768 bytes,
so that gives us another 256 bytes of precious code-space.
Now the non-EN versions are happy again.
Note that the alignment for the image changed from 512 to 256 bytes.
MBR-PROT.ASM, FIXCODE.C, PARTMAIN.ASM and AIR-BOOT.ASM have been
adjusted for this change.
The fight for code-space continues...
o Updating from v1.06 now also copies over drive-letters
When the user has forced drive-letters in v1.06 these will be copied
over to the v1.0.8 configuration when upgrading.
Because the drive-letter feature is broken in v1.07,
the drive-letter table does not get copied over when upgrading
from v1.07.
o Made FX-code optional to compile in
The FX-code supplies the shifting screen-effects when 'Cooper Bars'
is enabled in the setup. With the current enhancements made however,
there is a continuous lack of code-space, especially when debug-code
is included during development. The FX-code occupies some
1200 bytes, a space that can be put to better use. Therefore the
inclusion of the FX-code has been made conditional to make room for
either debugging or future new features.
o Also rewrite PBR on HPFS
Earlier, a fix was made to write a modified PBR back in case JFS was
used. This was done to enable the drive-letter feature on JFS, since
the PBR JFS-bootcode does not use the supplied PBR in memory.
With the enhancements in the drive-letter feature, the HPFS PBR
needs to be updated on disk also, to cope with zero drive-letters in
the HPFS PBR. This potentially fixes a missing drive-letter in the
PBR when the system is restored from an archive. You might need the
drive-letter feature to force the correct drive-letter on the first
boot, after which the feature can be disabled.
o Added extra MBR protection
When AiR-BOOT is active, it is only AiR-BOOT that writes to the MBR.
To protect the MBR from programming errors, like the one below,
any write to the MBR is now checked for validity.
In essence this is protecting your MBR from bad programming done
by me...
o Fixed a minor bug with displaying LVM drive-letters
When more partitions that can be displayed were present, scrolling
the menu would not scroll the drive-letter. Fixed.
o Fixed a bug with regard to the drive-letter feature
When partitions were deleted, and some partitions above the deleted
partition(s) had a drive-letter forced, these partitions would lose
this assignment. This bug is also present in v1.06.
