China DOS Union

Brother Budian, a few days ago I helped someone install GRUB for DOS to cooperate with the backup and restore functions of GHOST. But after restarting, the GRUB boot menu disappeared. (He has a brand computer, and there is its boot screen when booting, and there is an XP boot button.) I suspect that the boot program of the brand computer is solidified in the BIOS ROM, not allowing modification of the hard disk's master boot record? (My own computer is not a brand computer, and it's fine.)

But after just installing GRUB, there was a GRUB menu, but I couldn't boot from another hidden primary partition (the XP backup was placed there)! After booting, it froze. Forcibly powering off and restarting directly booted to the other hidden primary partition! (Maybe because I added MAKEACTIVE in the GRUB menu, the system made it active and hid the first partition?)

Using a Linux boot disk didn't work either (could boot to the first partition). Later I activated the XP primary partition again. An entry "Unrecognized operating system" appeared in XP's BOOT.INI..

Is it that brand computers don't allow installing other boot managers?

Use PQ to check if there are special partitions. Generally, the boot program is not固化 in the BIOS. My Lenovo notebook just bought also has one - key recovery function, which is that the manufacturer specially set up a partition.

I haven't seen this situation before, and it should belong to an individual case.

Thanks to Brother blue for the reply, I also think it might be like this. The manufacturer may have specially set up a boot partition to check and judge the partition situation in the system and automatically write it into boot.ini. There are its advantages to do this, but there are also its disadvantages, that is, it is too overbearing and cannot give users sufficient freedom.

Thanks, I used PQ to delete all partitions, rebuilt partitions, formatted, and also created a hidden partition for backup. No hidden partition was found. However, the key issue with my problem is whether the master boot is controlled by the brand computer..

You don't need to install GRLDR in the MBR. You can call GRLDR in BOOT.INI, that should be okay, right?

Can GRLDR boot to a hidden primary partition?

Okay, as long as it's in the primary partition, whether it's hidden or not. GRLDR just needs to exist in the root directory of some primary partition, whether that partition is hidden or not.

Using

chainloader (hd?,?)+1
boot

method, you can boot to any hidden or non-hidden partition.

Okay! I will definitely give it a try.

It should be a problem with the brand computer's BIOS