kernel must be located in the beginning sectors of the harddisk

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Nope. The Linux kernel image may be placed anywhere on the media, so long as it is entirely accessable to the boot loader. The boot loader may have limitations as to how much of your media is accessable; some boot loaders, when used with older systems (with less capable BIOS) cannot access anything past the first (IIRC) 1024 cylinders (without LBA or LINEAR access).

Those programmers who have developed boot loaders have taken various strategies to solve this sort of problem.

The LILO boot loader, for instance, must be pre-configured with a list of disk block addresses to be loaded as the kernel. This configuration is performed by the lilo(8) program which reads the target kernels, figures out their physical locations, and embeds that list of locations into the LILO boot loader.

Other boot loaders run stripped down operating systems that determine the kernel locations "on the fly". IIRC, grub is such a boot loader.

Outside of the simplest boot loader (like the one used to boot floppy disks), a boot loader usually implements it's boot in stages; the first stage loads a simple loader (which must fit within the minimal confines of the "simple" loader space) and this loader just has the job of loading the second stage loader. The 2nd stage loader (which can be much larger in size) determines which (of possibly many) configurations to load, and loads the appropriate third stage loader. The 3rd stage loader loads the specific target kernel.

Of course, this is a logical breakdown; the physical implementation may be different.

HTH - -- Lew Pitcher

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