Tom Austin wrote:
> setup grub

Actually, I was wondering about that, and about booting in general.

The boot sector is really only part of one sector. That doesn't seem 
like enough room to write code to find NTLDR or whatever the second step 
of Linux boot code is (GRUB I assume, or LILO). Especially given the 
wide range of partition types and RAID types a boot partition is allowed 
to be on in Linux.

How does it fit enough of the file system code into the boot mechanism 
to find the files it needs? Is there something special, such that (say) 
copying the file to a different place on the disk would keep things from 
booting?

I know you don't have to do anything special if you move NTLDR around, 
but that could be a special case in the Windows file system code, I'd 
guess. (Maybe I'll try moving it with my live CD and see if stuff still 
boots. :-) Even if not, both FAT and NTFS are relatively easy to deal 
with, so I can imagine the code being sufficiently simple for a 
specifically-named file in the root directory.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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