[mythtv-users] OT Bootloader that can detect how machine wasstarted?

[Marco Nelissen]

(message reformatted for readabilitu)
>Does anyone know of a way of have a PC boot into Windows if the power
> button is pressed, or into Linux in response to a WakeOverLan event.  
>
>The most powerful machine I have is the machine used by the whole
>family for gaming and surfing.  It seems such a waste not to use it
>for transcoding.  So what I thought was s that I'd set it up for
>dual boot (no problem with that).  However it's not easy getting
>machine time (kids are addicted to The Sims), so I though it would
>bee good if my myth backend wake it up during the day when there's
>no-one around. (Or maybe I'm just crazy!)

My first though was "that's not possible", but after thinking about
it some more I think you can probably cobble something together
with wake-on-lan and network boot. The PC in question would have
to be set up to boot from a tftp server (most modern BIOSes can do
this, but if yours does not you can use the 'grub' bootloader and
set it up for tftp boot).
Then you need to configure the tftp server (which for convenience
should probably run on your myth backend) to send it the right file
to boot from, e.g. a bootloader that boots from either your linux
partition or your windows partition, based on whether it was the
backend that woke up the machine.