About
This is a little project, written in assembly (nasm), that perform a simple idea: boot several Operative Systems in fully separated disk spaces.
ZorOS is only a boot manager: it loads and execute only boot sectors. Further bootstrap operations are left at systems loaders.
|
|
|
Some features
ZorOS boot code is installed in MBR and in some sectors of track 0, beginning from sector 51 to 59, so this boot manager does not overlay other boot mangers.
In absolute sector n.51 are stored 12 partition records and these partitions may be mapped in MBR, in any order, at boot time. With a reference text file, user-administrator can define partition size, boot order, menus, and real MBR partitions table shown at selected boot entry
A special feature performs a boot of etherboot ROM code, installed in track 0 (sect.4 to 50) and also a simple boot password is implemented.
|
|
|
How it works
As other boot managers, MBR code load additional code using standard int13 bios call. The full code is then relocated and executed. The program performs some check, adjust partitions table (only if necessary), load, check and exec boot record as defined in reference file. For partitions allocated beyond cyl 1023, the program uses extended disk bios call, of course, so disks up 2TB are supported.
|
|
|
Download
Latest release is 2.6 (update: Mar 03 2009), available here to download md5sum
Changelog
03/03/2009 - first public release of software
02/28/2009 - improved installer, .asm sources, so size of binary code is reduced below to 4k
|
|