>At 9:25 PM 11/14/97, Michael G. Schabert wrote:
>>"automount" and "bootable" with partitioning/formatting software. His
>>point was that Startup Disk CDeV however doesn't know partitions. It will
>>only let you choose the disk, which will then boot from the first

It depends on what disk driver you use. You could pick the partition with
Lacie Silverlining 5.6.3, it was broke with 5.6.5, and it worked again with
5.7. At the time I was concerned about this, MacOS was at System 7.5.3. The
latest version of Silverlining is 5.8.1, and I seem to remember that it's
broke, but I don't have more than one bootable partition on a drive at this
moment. This was the response I got from Lacie tech support when I reported
this as a bug in 5.6.5:

>Please note the name of the control panel: Startup _Disk_, not Startup
>_Volume_.  Use the control panel to select the boot SCSI drive, then make
>the boot volume the first in alphabetical order. The easiest way to
>achieve this is by putting a "bullet" (option-8) in front of the name of
>the partition you wish to start from.

I don't like that plan, because it tends to screw up my Finder aliases, and
it breaks a few other programs as well. FWB Hard Disk Toolkit, on the other
hand, picks the lowest partition with the "bootable" box checked, even if
there is more than one. If you had only one drive, all you would have to do
is check or uncheck the bottom partition, and leave the upper one checked.

The system call SetDefaultStartup is described in "Inside Macintosh:Start
Mgr." It takes a parameter block containing the driver reference number, as
well as two "reserved" bytes. The driver reference number is to a disk, not
a volume. The fact that switching partitions ever worked means to me, that
LaCie and Apple were using some undocumented magic, but then thought better
of it.




Fred Bruckman               URL:http://www.enteract.com/~fb