On Thursday 25 November 2004 18:15, Paul Howarth wrote: > Grub is installed in your Master Boot Record (1st block of disk). This > doesn't move or get renamed when you change the partition table, so at > least the first stage can run. It then has to find its menu and second > stage, which depends on it knowing which partition those were installed on, > and that can be affected by changes to the partition table. Then it has to > load up the OS kernel, which again depends on the partition table. So grub > *can* fail in a variety of places. That suggests to me that it's probably safest to put grub in hda1 or so, and mark that partition bootable. That works with the standard DOS bootstrap which I had occasion to read recenmt (well, actually the code I was readong was sourced from Apple's Darwin project). What it does is scan the partition table in the first sector to discover the first bootable sector. Then it reads sector and jumps into it. What happens if there is not bootable partition is the reason I was reading the code:-) fwiw there's 8K or so of space there available for use for the bootloader in the Darwin filesystem I was using. Can't recall whether that was ufs, hfs or both. -- Cheers John
