From: Pavel Roskin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: stage1_lba is corrupt?
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 20:58:44 +0400 (EEST)
> It works!!!
> I've installed GRUB on /dev/hdc4 which is above 6 Gygabytes!!!
> I don't need to keep GRUB on a disk writeable by Windows 95 :-)
Fantastic! :)
> What is "forced loading"?
When booting a PC, the drive number used for reading the bootloader
program is passed to the program (in %dl). So most bootloaders need
not to remember which drive should be used, and just assume %dl should
be used. However, for a bootloader that consists of multiple programs
(like GRUB and FreeBSD bootloader), this is not enough, because all
the programs does not always reside in one disk. Thus, GRUB assumes
that %dl should be used for loading stage2 if the boot drive is 0xff,
otherwise the boot drive should be used. In the manual, the latter
case is called "forced loading".
> Is it necessary when stage2 is not on the boot drive?
Yes.
> If it is, why is it not default?
Because GRUB has been designed not to depend on the configuration of
a computer or the geometry of a boot disk as much as possible. Suppose
that you have a removable disk and it is accessible only when a media
is inserted in it.
Another case is where you use /sbin/grub for the installation and
/sbin/grub may not guess BIOS drives correctly.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
OKUJI Yoshinori <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ^o-o^
http://duff.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~okuji (in English) m /
