[GRLUG] Active Partitions

[Justin Denick]

On Dec 4, 2007 3:00 PM, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 4, 2007 2:50 PM, Justin Denick <justin.denick at gmail.com> wrote:
> > FWIW, I did not try GRUB. Grub is garbage.
>
> Obviously, opinions differ.
>
>
> > I installed the MBR onto /dev/sda1, because fdisk makes you select a
> > partition to make active. Purist would argue that the MBR should only be
> > installed onto /dev/sda, but I think that has to do with sector size and
> > cylinder number issue that I feel are no longer pertinent today.
>
> I'll assume by 'MBR' you mean the bootloader - LILO in this case.  The
> MBR, being the a region of the disk (the first 512 bytes), can't be
> 'installed' onto one of the disk's partitions.  As far as installing
> the bootloader in a partition, it's perfectly acceptable behavior -
> especially in certain multi-boot configurations.  Sounds like, if
> you'd installed the bootloader into the MBR, instead of a partition,
> your BIOS may not have had an issue booting the drive (my brand-new
> Intel board at home certainly doesn't).

If that is what is sounded like why would I have bothered to debug to an issue
that never even existed, and if that were the case, I would not have posted the
message.

Though your comment had inspired me. Seems my solution
is invalid as it was not needed for your new Intel Board at home.
And I hate fragile solutions.

Looking deeper into the matter

When booting (i.e., starting) a computer, the master boot record (MBR)
looks at the partition table and selects the primary partition that is
marked active in that table. The MBR is a small program that is
executed when a computer starts up in order to find the operating
system and load it into memory. It also contains the partition table
and other information needed by the BIOS (basic input output system)
to access the hard disk drive (HDD).

http://www.linfo.org/active_partition.html

Seems that unlike other BIOS that I have used in the past, this particular one,
unlike the Tim's, required that at least one partition be marked as active.

I have now installed LILO onto the MBR, rather than onto the
[1]Partition and the machine boots fine.
I assume this would work with grub as well if not, your just going to
have to wait.
They have scrapped the project altogether, GRUB 2 will be more promising.



>
>
> --tim
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