Ritesh Raj Sarraf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>(by way of Ritesh Raj Sarraf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) writes:
> So, Is the boot-loader so smart and powerful (much more that the > kernel) that it reads data from the disk without knowing the type of > disk and the filesystem type ? I mean the kernel requires modules to > be loaded to detect the type of disk (scsi or ide) , type of > filesystem etc.. The boot-loader doesn't require anything ? Amazing. The BIOS knows how to access the disk physically (i.e. how to load a certain sector given its sector number). If your mainboard has a SCSI interface, its BIOS knows how to access disks connected to it. If you have a separate SCSI card, it (i.e. the card) contains some BIOS code to access the disks connected to it. However, BIOSes usually access disks in a very simple, backward compatible, slow way. While many OSes did indeed use the facilities of the BIOS for all disk access until the late 1980's or early 1990's, this would be *much* too slow for anything but initially loading the kernel on more modern systems. Some bootloaders (e.g. grub) do indeed have the capability to interpret filesystems. Others just record the information in which sectors the kernel is stored, so they don't have to interpret the filesystem in order to load the kernel. Martin -- ,--. ,= ,-_-. =. / ,- ) Martin Dickopp, Dresden, Germany ((_/)o o(\_)) \ `-' http://www.zero-based.org/ `-'(. .)`-' `-. \_/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
