advanced dualboot linux+win with grub

On Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:59:26 GMT, CBFalconer staggered into the Black Sun and said: snip

? Uh, what? Bootloaders on the x86 *must* do something like this, because 446 bytes just isn't enough code to read a filesystem.

The MBR only needs to store two absolute disk addresses in GRUB. Those are the first sector of stage 1.5, and the first sector of GRUB's root filesystem. In the normal "GRUB on the MBR" install, there's some slack space between the parbreastion table and the start ofdev-hda1 . That space is plenty for the stage 1.5 that's appropriate for GRUB's root parbreastion. GRUB AFAIK tries to copy stage 1.5 in a block of contiguous sectors. When stage 1.5 is loaded, GRUB can read its root filesystem.

So once GRUB can read its root filesystem, it can load stage 2, and then load its menu file and display that.

? Once stage 1.5 is loaded, GRUB can read a filesystem. Sector positions don't matter. Stage 1.5 is copied to a contiguous block of sectors when you do "setup(hd0)" from the GRUB prompt.

If all this is correct, then you have to reinstall stage 1.5 when you change the filesystem on GRUB's root filesystem. This is annoying, sure, but how often do you change the filesystem onboot ?

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