lin-club  

Re: [Haifux] dual boot

Tzafrir Cohen
Sun, 26 May 2002 19:10:48 -0700

On Mon, 27 May 2002, Ez-Aton wrote:

> I will check. I belive it has some sort of removal mechanism, I will check
> into it.
> It's just that I preffer Lilo...

I personally wouldn't trust such a "uninstall" option to cleany
"uninstall" lilo without understanding a couple of things about boot
loaders.

You see, only one program can occupy the MBR, the first sector of the disk
that is executed by the bios if the system is to be loaded from this disk.

This is only 512 bytes, and it also has to include the main partition
table, so boot loaders place only an initial piece of code there that
calls the rest of the code from a seperate location (OK, at least lilo
does).

Anyway, when the boot loader gets installed, it has a chance of saving the
old data/boot-loader that was there.

However this data is not guaranteed to be correct anymore. If you have
happened to change your windows partition, this information is probably
invalid, that is: point to an ifformation that will not load you your
system.

Generally you should run over lilo/grub with a new boot-loader. e.g:
run 'fdisk /mbr' as someone else suggested.

[general comment: I didn't reply to the original message. I replied to
this message. This one is interesting enough. See
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html . Though a beginner
will sometimes find this difficult to follow ;-) . I also must comment
that my attitude to newbie questions differs depending on the mailing
list. http://linux.org.il/mailing-lists/ ]

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir



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