Long loading time in Grub4dos

Hello, I'm new to this community!

I installed grub4dos on my Pentium 133 32 MB Ram laptop (no floppy drive) in order to boot from different floppy images and even the CD drive.

I installed this way:

bootlace 0x80

It works! But it takes a long time (around 20 secons) to boot (and also fails to save the "savedefault").

Is there a way to speed this up? The hard drive seems to be working while the time passes, maybe there is some configuration that I'm missing.

Point is (may be) which specific version of grub4dos are you using.

Normally one would use a recent 0.4.6a version or the latest version of the (more stable/tested) 0.4.5c, but in a (actually rather large) number of cases, you can do with a much older (almost "historical") version, the 0.4.4 2009-10-16, here:

http://reboot.pro/to...16641-grub4dos/

The long loading may however also be due (on such a low-power machine, both as processor and disk, besides the "low" amount of RAM )  to a number of actions that the "embedded" menu.lst in grub4dos performs when booting.

Basically when it is run the grub4dos reads and execute the instructions in the embedded menu.lst (the last few bytes of either grldr or grub.exe) that in more recent version may have become complex (iincluding looking for the "external" menu.lst, and/or PXE, etc.).

Try the 0.4.4 version suggested and see if it makes a difference, otherwise try editing the grldr removing the "look up" commands you don't *need*, i.e. make it point to a hardcoded path menu.lst.

Or maybe you are still using an older than 0.4.4 2009-10-16 verson, some of those are buggy.

Wonko

Ciao and thanks for the quick reply!

I downloaded and installed the 0.4.4 version (from here)

I read somewhere I'm supposed to edit grldr in Notepad++, which I did. I noticed vim can do the job as well. I removed everything from (including) "pxe detect" on, and just left

configfile /menu.lst

And the escape character at the end.

It still takes ages. If there was a change in boot speed, it is unnoticeable. I see that it still is sweeping my disk looking for something.

What else can I remove from grldr?
I'd like to have it as streamlined as possible, as I will only use it to boot from floppy images, cd drive and of course Win95 on the first hard drive.
How can I make it to just boot to /menu.lst in the first hard drive, first partition and not look for anything else?

What's the right way to do this?

I just noticed that you pointed me to a different 0.4.4 version. I tried it and it works almost perfect now. Thank you! I can't believe there's such a big difference. I went from 20 seconds to 3, 4.

I wonder, what happened to the project, did development stop? Is this the community of the developers?

One little thing I still get is the "grub4dos error occurred while savedefault".

Could you please tell me how could I get it to save the default? Any other advises are appreciated :þ

Cheers

https://www.rmprepus...he-menu-entries

You probably don't have the default file?

For the record (and for future memory) the development of grub4dos has moved several times.

At the time unfortunately the sourceforge access was lost exactly at a time when the latest version (2009-03-31) was (particularly) buggy, development continued on nufans.net (also dead now) and latest and ONLY "supported" version of the 0.4.4 series is the one I pointed to (and NO ONE ELSE[1]).

Development has continued and it is still ongoing on one of the current developers/maintainer sites, here:

http://grub4dos.chen...oads/#year_2014

Reboot.pro remains the unofficially official "western" support board.

Wonko

[1] On Chenall's site there are a few later versions of the 0.4.4 series, that may be good as well, BUT that - unlike the 2009-10-16 version, have not been used extensively as soon various versions of the 0.4.5 became in common use.

As hinted before, IMNSHO the OLDest version that works properly on a given hardware and has the features you need should be chosen, whilst if you want to experiment with some of the new, powerful features of later versions you can try both latest of the 0.4.5c series or a not-latest-latest version of the 0.4.6a series (which being the "experimental" branch may - in this or that version - introduce a bug, either a new one or a re-introduced one).

Of course *any* version, as long as it works on your specific hardware and does what you *need* to do is fine anyway.