How It Works

When the boot process load the Boot Sector or Master Boot Record of a drive, the special bootmanager code installed here will attempt to load and start the bootmanager. If it fails then to the greatest extent it will try to follow the normal boot scheme.

If no changes has been made to the system the right bootmanager will in most cases be found. Note that several bootmanagers can exist on the same machine, because the boot code uses serial numbers to locate the right one. When found and successfully loaded into memory, execution is transfered and the bootmanager code saves some important values passed from the boot code. The system then initializes the memory and video display. Then the contenst of the main menu is built from information found during a search of the system. Now the main menu is displyed.

From here its possible to enter the setup screen, load the boot sector or master boot record from another drive or simply boot one of the boot items in the menu. Boot items can both be partitions which was found during the system search, but also user configured items. The user configured items are bootloaders, that is they are configured to boot a specific operation system with specific parameters.

If the user does nothing for a while, the screensaver is started. You may return to the bootmanager by pressing any valid key.

On the main setup screen its is possible to choose one of the specific setup screens. There are a screen for configuring the boot menu, one for configuring how partitions are shown, one for configuring boot loaders, a Feature screen for configuring some global features of the bootmanager, a security screen and a color setup screen.

Security is a popular topic today. An in order to allow more users to use the bootmanager, some advanced security features can be enabled. Among these are multi-level security, auto-logout, password protected partitions and other boot-items. Security features which are going to be added later on will include logging.

Features complete

This is a list of features in the bootmanager:

• It will boot any operating system from any partition on any harddrive, if the OS itself supports it.
• Change between simple and enhanced graphic mode.
• Change the colors used in the bootmanager.

Features currently working on

This is a list of features that we are currently working on. They are added but may not function properly.

• Configure the order of entries in the main menu - show partition before or after bootloader entries or not at all.
• Sort the items in the boot menu, alphabetically.
• Beep when the bootmanager is ready to receive orders.
• Auto-logout when the screen saver is activated.
• Timeout before screensaver is activated.
• Set default boot item.
• Automatically choose the last item which was booted.
• Set password on partitions.
• Hide partitions for the boot menu.
• Move partition entries around so they appear differently in the boot menu.
• Timeout before the bootmanager automatically chooses the default boot item.
• Set administrator password.
• Set password for the Load MBR menu.
• Set password for the Setup itself.
• Set generic user access password.
• Use a key to interfere with the search system routine.
• Enable required logon. This may be obsolete, if generic user passwords are used.

Features To Add

This is a list of larger features which is planned to be added in later versions of the program:

• Our own bootcode for MS-DOS, Window 95/98, Window NT, Linux and other OS.
• Boot different OSes from the same partition (if they share the same partition format).
• MultiBoot specification compliancy.
• Online Help Screens. All of the online help screens in the program are currently blank. This is properly going to be the last feature added, because so much changes when adding new features.
• Logging of any bootmanager event.
• Boot from cd-rom.
• Shutdown and turn off the computer. (BIOS must provide these functions)
• File viewer.

Compliance

The bootmanager is currently compliant with the following de-facto standards:

• Standard Disk Format
• Extended Partition (CHS)

Standards that the bootmanager will comply to in future builds:

• MultiBoot Standard

Bugs

This is a list of currently known bugs. Do not try to provoke these bugs, they might have evil intensions :-) If you do find a new bug please use this form to inform us.

• Do not choose the Security Setup screen at all, it will for sure crash the system.

Other

These are links to other pages with usefull technical information about the bootmanager:

• Build history