[nflug] Disk Image/Restore

[joshj at linuxmail.org]

When we last left our adventurers...

>>
>>  Win98 must have some kind of "boot loader" (or equivilant) on the first
>>  512 of the HD otherwise there would be nothing to pass control to the
>>  kernel, right?
>>
>>  -Josh
>> 
> No, again this is done in the partitioning. As long as the partition is made 
> bootable (in fdisk on Linux, type a, then partition number). You will see an 
> asterisk next to the partition number. You can put boot instructions 
> anywhere, like install grub to a partition rather than the mbr, etc.. As long 
> as your BIOS is set to hit the drive, then it sees the bootable partition, 98 
> takes over from there. Actually so does xp, etc.. I know this because we 
> reuse drives all the time with different things on mbr's, etc.. If we say, 
> put xp on a drive that previously had grub on the mbr, we could ghost, dd, 
> tar the xp copy onto the drive and then it would fail to boot UNTIL we blank 
> the mbr. You can do this in xp by booting with the cd and I think it's fixmbr 
> from the rescue console (providing xp had an administrative password or you 
> know it, plenty of hack tools out there to provide this and you actually NEED 
> an administrative password for the administrator account to get to the rescue 
> console). Then after you can install grub on the mbr and within grub's xp 
> stanza, it nicely hands off to xp as though it's the only thing there 
> (chainloader +1) and if it's on another drive, xp needs to be the first so 
> you use the mapping in grub's stanzas "map (hd0) (hd1)" "map (hd1) (hd0)" 
> because you know windows has to be the first and only drive on a box right? 
> ;)

Huh. I know win* does _something_ to my MBR. Because anytime I've 
reinstalled any windows it overwrites it and I have to re-run grub
if I want to get to Linux. But I didn't think that the bios
was smart enough to look beyond the first HD sector for boot information. 
So if I did a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1" to get rid of 
my MBR and my windows partition is set to bootable (and its the first 
partition) I could still boot windows?

-Josh


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