On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 16:10 -0700, Les wrote: > The head then moves to track 0, which is the inside track of the disk. > When the boot strap starts up, it reasserts the move to track 0 and > looks for the first sector. The head decodes the information on the > disk, looking for the tunnel markers that center the head in the > track, and also decoding the data looking for the sector marks. When > the sector matching that sent by the program, the disk begins reading > and reads the sector under the head. This is the MBR of the disk. > This code is only slightly smarter than the hardware bootstrap, and so > it needs disk and sector location to find the program to actually > boot. One thing I've wondered: If the very beginning of a drive goes bad, is the drive able to remap that in a way that makes it seem like the replacement is the very beginning (so you can still read a MBR and boot from the drive)? Few drives are perfect, and much of the problems are handled by the drive so that you'd never know it. But does it also handle that case? -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
