Hello!

In message <199611191310.OAA02401@line9.slipneu.tu-freiberg.de>
          Peter Berg <Peter.Berg@ww.tu-freiberg.de> wrote:

> Has anyone yet spoken to ART about a modification of their bootsequence ?
> If we can make ART to implement a HD seek procedure into RiscOS which checks 
> the bootsector of *any* harddrive/floppy, this would be the best solution.
> I would't say that this is to complicated, it only depends on how cooperative 
> ART will be.

I'm clearly late in doing so, but I want to object to this as much as possible!
I definitely don't want ART to copy broken things from the DOS world for
questionable results and with clear drawbacks for everyone!
You could put information like this in the CMOS RAM where it belongs which is
in fact already done, see below.

I don't get the point in keeping RiscOS out of the boot sequence anyway.
Are you all aware of the Fastboot and Autoboot options? They really need to be
mentioned somewhere (as well as the options you can give to !BtRiscBSD in its
!Run-file) as undocumented features are unused features.
Read !BtRiscBSD.FBInstall which explains what you have to do.
This has two effects:
1) If you use reboot instead of halt in the kshell, a bit in the CMOS RAM is
set which is then read during the RiscOS boot sequence, which then boots RiscBSD
without further action from the user.
2) If you press ALT while booting, RiscBSD is booted immediately by the RiscOS
boot sequence. I estimate this takes less than 10s longer than RiscBSD being
booted directly by a ROM program.
It should be fairly easy to swap this so that RiscBSD is booted automatically
and you have to press ALT to get into RiscOS. Look at it, I'm sure you can do
this yourself.

Cheers, Markus