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Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments

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wolf.b:
Hello Armando,

Yes, if believe that if your hard drive is sata or scsi, then it will be identified as "sda" ...
-Armando
--- End quote ---

Yes, I have S-ATA drive.

Where do you think can I get the boot sector of that partition.
-wolf.b
--- End quote ---
What do you mean ? You want to be able to read it? or change where GRUB resides...?
-Armando
--- End quote ---

Yes, I would like to read the boot sector of my Ubuntu partition, I don't want to change GRUB's location. I believe GRUB is installed in the boot sector of the ext3 partition. I can see a folder hda6/boot/grub and inside is a file menu.lst.

My understanding of the boot sequence is this (and might be wrong):BIOS checks which medium (floppy, HDD, CDROM, USB, network) is set up to be primary boot device. In case of HDD, it loads the first sector (MBR = IPL + 4x16 bytes partition table + 2 bytes signature) of the first HDD into RAM at location 0000:7C00h. It then passes control to IPL.

IPL (initial program loader = first 446 bytes of MBR) checks for errors, relocates itself, loads one sector from disk (boot sector of active primary partition) into RAM at location 0000:7C00h and passes control to it.

Boot sector (or boot record) checks for errors, loads kernel file (IO.SYS for DOS, NTLDR for XP, ...) and passes control to it.

Now this the point where I think that different OS implement different strategies to continue. But I think that NTLDR might be able to boot Ubuntu, If I only manage to save the boot record of the EXT3 partition to a file on C: (eg C:\SECTOR\ubuntu.bin) and add a line to boot.ini saying "C:\SECTOR\ubuntu.bin = "Ubuntu 7.10"




I have just remembered that a disk editor is the tool to do that (cylinder 521, head 1, sector 1 in my case, screenshot inside spoiler). More by chance than design that sector is accessible by old DOS tools who can only read the first 1024 cylinders. But I am not sure weather that will be the best/correct way to go.
Reading this makes me think to give up for now on NTLDR, but insert an entry in C:\BOOT\GRUB\menu.lst which is used by GRUB4DOS. GRUB4DOS shows a menu initially and offers editing and a command line. The entry which I have added goes like this (copied from mounted ext3 disk, /boot/grub/menu.list):


--- ---title Ubuntu 7.10
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=06031e16-7deb-44ad-b2b1-74736c0c3e5f ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet

I cannot thank you enough for your replies to my posts, as they are always giving me directions. My biggest problem at the moment is that I can't even ask questions, because I don't know what to ask. Especially when answering "what do you mean?" I realize how profund my ignorance is on Linux related topics. Your questions keep directing my lines of thought and when I finally send my next post (I often need more than an hour just to write a post), I feel as if I have taken the next step on my journey to Linux. :)

Armando for president!


Greetings
Wolf

wolf.b:
Just for the record:This page How To Multi-Boot Operating Systems is full of useful infos and illustrating pictures.

wolf.b:
Another one for the record:

I was able to start my new Ubuntu 7.10 using GRUB4DOS. That code from post #30 did the trick on my first attempt. I guess that makes me now a Linux user. What is the quickest way to mess it all up?

jgpaiva:
What is the quickest way to mess it all up?
-wolf.b (October 28, 2007, 03:49 PM)
--- End quote ---

simple!
cd /
sudo rm -rf *.*
:D :D

wolf.b:
would that do the same as
4dos /c del /s/y/z \*.*
does for DOS/Windows?

I guess yes. I have found that trying to get my 2nd monitor involved (which is attached to PCI graphics card, 1st monitor is on onboard graphics card) takes so much longer, but messes up things thoroughly as well. :) I am getting better at doing a fresh reinstall.

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