Re: After 3 reboots boot alternative system ?

[Brett Russ]

Ulrich Hochholdinger wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 01:40:13PM +0200, Andreas Jung wrote:
>  
>
> > I was wondering if any boot manager for Linux has the following option:
> > * Boot an alternative system if n reboots already happend.
> >    
> With Lilo you can boot with "lilo -R command line" which is a once only
> boot of this command line, 
>
> This feature is, at the moment, missing in grub and I would also like to
> see this in grub.
I use the Redhat version of GRUB which does have support for this.  They 
patched it to accept a "--once" option to the 'savedefault' command to 
allow boot once on a menu entry.

I *think* the maintainer of GRUB (and possibly others) consider this a 
hack, but it works for me.

One way the bootloader/BIOS/OS could communicate would be through CMOS 
memory (are there any free locations?), but I think you're going to need 
a watchdog timer to get timeout protection.

BR