On 04-Aug-01 David Freeman wrote:
On Sat, 4 Aug 2001 13:43:20 +0100 Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 12:27:19AM +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
What I meant to actually say in simple english was that I believe the MBR only stores the current active partition and looks there for the boot record instruction bit.
Perhaps it would help to understand more of the boot process, so here it as to the best of my knowledge.
<snip discription of how linux boots>
Actually, the MBR store the locations of the first 4 partitions. The last few bytes of the MBR are the partition table and the 2-byte magic number 0xaa55 (or is it 0x55aa). IIRC the MBR is loaded into sector 0x60 (address 0x600). For MSDOS, it then loads the first part of the OS, or the 2nd level boot, into sector 0x70. After that there are no standards.