More grub questions

From: Leonard Evens (len_at_math.northwestern.edu)
Date: 01/29/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 08:19:27 -0600

I've been studying the grub documentation because I want to understand
it well before I go ahead to fix my MBR so that I can dual boot with
grub. There are several things that I'm still not sure about.

First, is there a good place to find out about the structure of the
master boot record and just exactly what installing grub puts there.
I've compared a raw XP MBR with one with grub installed and done octal
dumps, but of course they are a bit hard to interpret. At a minimum
installing grub has to leave the partition table unchanged. Once when
trying to understand lilo I figured out most of this and wrote it down
somewhere, but I have no idea where I put it. The grub manual section
on the MBR has not yet been written as far as I can tell.

Second, I've listed the files provided with the Fedora Core 2 grub rpm
package. The files in /usr/share/grub/i386..., including stage1 and
stage2, at some point after that are copied to /boot/grub and
configuration and device map files are constructed. This must be done
during installation. I presume I can find this by examining the
Anaconda script, but I hope there is a simpler way to get that information.

Finally, stage2 in /boot/grub differs from the stage2 in
/us/share/grub/i386... I presume this is because it needs to know
where the configuration file is. How is it changed?

Relevant Pages

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