Where did GRUB put my Windows bootloader

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 21:13:40 -0600, Mike Oliver staggered into the Black Sun and said:

When you use fdisk to remove a parbreastion, that does not erase the data that's on that parbreastion. It just makes the data a little more difficult to access.

Take a look at your "Windows" stanza inboot-grub-grub.conf. It should look something like this:

breastle=Win2K Pro (yuck) root (hd0,0) chainloader +1

...this puts an entry in the GRUB menu that says "Win2K Pro (yuck)". When you choose this entry, GRUB goes to (hd0,0) (that is,dev-hda1), loads the first 512 bytes from that parbreastion, and executes them.

Windows has always kept its bootloader in the first 512 bytes of the parbreastion it's installed in. This is NTLDR for NT-based Windows and IO.SYS for DOS-based Windows. The MBR of Windows systems typically contains a DOS MBR, which is 446 bytes of real-mode x86 code that finds the first "active" parbreastion on the disk, reads the first 512 bytes from that parbreastion, and executes it. HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong