Re: nature of a boot loader
Bruce Park wrote:
Dai,
My understanding with booting an OS works like this. The BIOS must
first be set to detect something. In my computer, I have it boot in this
order.
1. floppy
2. cdrom
3. primary hard disk
This is pretty much self explanatory. Now once floppy and cdrom fail,
it'll load whatever is in the MBR. In my case, it's GRUB. GRUB has two
loading stages 1 and 2. Stage 1 is nothing much and just loads stage 2
which is usually the GRUB menu. One a choice is made, the kernel and the
root file system is mounted. By now, your OS should start loading
appropriate things.
Because of the nature of a boot loader, I don't think it can load
another boot loader such as lilo or even GRUB thats a part of another
disk. I'm only beginning to understand how all these things work. I
could be totally wrong but this my understanding after reading documents
online.
But GRUB can chainload another boot loader on the same disk like this:
titile DOS
rootnoverify (hd0, 0)
chainloader +1
My question is can GRUB load another boot loader on another disk?
Now we can use GRUB to boot everything in both hard drives. The ONLY
problem I can see with this is by showing you an example. Let's say I
have two hard drivers, hd0 and hd1. GRUB will boot from MBR of the first
hard drive. The original grub.conf or menu.lst lies in the hd0.
If I go into hd1 and need to edit grub, now I have to mount hd0 then
write the GRUB configuration. As far as I can see, it's really not much
trouble at all but that's the ONLY thing that I can see where this
becomes a problem.
Yes. It's very easy to use GRUB. In fact I also have GRUB work this way.
Let me know if this helps at all. I'm always happy to help linux users.
bp
Thank you very much.
Dai yuwen
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