Paul Howarth wrote:
Duncan Lithgow wrote:
If Paul did say that, he's wrong. The _Master_ boot record is on hda - the first sector.
My mistake, I misunderstood by not seeing the difference between hda and hda1. If I've been able to follow this thread since I started it then I get the idea that while there is a _Master_ BR at the start of hda, there is also a space at the start of hda1 and each partition - for the purpose of each partition being able to be bootable and hold a boot manager.
I am basically on track?
Yes. The Windows bootloader that it puts in the MBR just looks for the first "bootable" partition and loads the bootloader from the start of that partition. On the other hand, if grub is installed in the MBR, it uses its configuration file to decide what to do and completely ignores the "bootable" flags on the partition table entries.
At least that's my understanding.
Paul.
This would agree with my investigations. In my case, I was working with an IBM T42 and attempting to make the machine dual bootable, including leaving the IBM diagnostic partition bootable using Fedora Core 2. (I do know about the BIOS/IDE geometry issue and used the appropriate workarounds for that.)
My first attempt was to use Partition Magic to reduce the size of the Windows XP partition, install Linux partitions in the free space created, install grub in the linux boot partition and make the linux partition active.
This did not work: two possible hypotheses. I had something configured wrong in grub.conf. OR. Either the BIOS or grub didn't like the fact that grub and/or its stage1.5 were beyond the 2 GIG boundary.
I finally gave up, and installed grub in the MBR. Have a successful dual boot machine, but can not currently get the IBM diagnostic partition to boot.
John
