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'\" t
.\" @(#)activate.8
.\" This page is based on the lilo docs, which carry the following
.\" COPYING condition:
.\"
.\" LILO program code, documentation and auxiliary programs are
.\" Copyright 1992-1994 Werner Almesberger.
.\" All rights reserved.
.\"
.\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms of parts of or the
.\" whole original or derived work are permitted provided that the
.\" original work is properly attributed to the author. The name of the
.\" author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from
.\" this software without specific prior written permission. This work
.\" is provided "as is" and without any express or implied warranties.
.\"
.\" Original version of this manpage:
.\" Peter Maydell (pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk), 03/1998
.\"
.TH ACTIVATE 8 "March 1998"
.SH NAME
activate \- read/write flags marking active boot partition
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B /sbin/activate
.I device
.br
show which partition is currently marked active on device
.br
.B /sbin/activate
.I device partition
.br
mark specified partition as active on given device
.SH DESCRIPTION
.LP
.B activate
is a simple program which sets the partition which will be used to boot
the system. To be precise, it sets a flag in the partition table of the
hard disk. This may or may not have an effect on the bootup procedure.
PC booting is complicated, and this manual page does not attempt to
explain it; for more information on what partition you should set active,
you should consult the documentation for your bootloader (an example
bootloader is
.B lilo,
which has a good manual in /usr/doc/lilo/ on Debian systems).
Note that programs such as
.B fdisk
will also allow you to set the active
partition; it is probably better to use one of these, since they
generally provide services such as allowing you to view the partition
table before picking which partition to activate, and provide opportunity
to confirm actions before writing to the partition table. However,
these programs have more checking for 'wrong' values; for instance,
they might not allow you to set the active flag on an extended partition
(because this is generally a bad idea).
.BR activate ,
on the other hand, assumes you really do know what you're doing
and doesn't have any bothersome prompts or sanity checks.
In particular,
.B activate
makes
.I no
checks that the device you give has a partition table on it at all!
If you specify the wrong device it will happily write garbage to it.
.SH OPTIONS
.I device
should be a block device such as /dev/hda. Note that it does
not make sense to give one of the partition devices such as /dev/hda3.
.I partition
should be a number between 1 and 4 specifying which partition should
have the active flag set.
If no partition number is given, activate will print out the partition
which is currently marked active.
.SH BUGS
.B activate
should check that the device actually has a partition table on it.
.SH AUTHOR
Werner Almesberger (almesber@bernina.ethz.ch).
.br
Peter Maydell (pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk) wrote this manual page.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR lilo (8),
.BR fdisk (8)
.B lilo
comes with extensive documentation; this can be found in
/usr/doc/lilo/ on Debian systems.
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