Re: BIOS startup ??

On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 16:10 -0700, Les wrote:
The head then moves to track 0, which is the inside track of the disk.
When the boot strap starts up, it reasserts the move to track 0 and
looks for the first sector. The head decodes the information on the
disk, looking for the tunnel markers that center the head in the
track, and also decoding the data looking for the sector marks. When
the sector matching that sent by the program, the disk begins reading
and reads the sector under the head. This is the MBR of the disk.
This code is only slightly smarter than the hardware bootstrap, and so
it needs disk and sector location to find the program to actually
boot.

One thing I've wondered: If the very beginning of a drive goes bad, is
the drive able to remap that in a way that makes it seem like the
replacement is the very beginning (so you can still read a MBR and boot
from the drive)?

Few drives are perfect, and much of the problems are handled by the
drive so that you'd never know it. But does it also handle that case?

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Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7.

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