[vox-tech] bootable partition question

[Edwin P. Groot]

At 08:13 PM 7/29/02 -0700, you wrote:
>begin Stephen M. Helms <smh@silkie.org> 
>> 
>> Quoting Peter Jay Salzman <p@dirac.org>:
>hi stephen,
> 
>i'm pretty sure that's correct, but what i'd like to know is, when
>lilo is on the MBR, does the bootable flag become meaningless?

     Yes, meaningless, except if you have a Microsoft OS on the same disk.
If I try to boot to a MS DOS or Windows partition and it does not have the
active (all partitions can be bootable, but only one at a time can be
selected to boot to == active) flag set, I get the "non-bootable or invalid
partition" error.  Why not try clearing all the active flags and see what
happens? ;)
     My question is, if there is only 400-odd bytes in the MBR for a
bootstrap, and LILO is in it, how does it know which partition the Linux
boot program is on?  Does it read which partition in the MBR partition
table (the last 100-odd bytes in the MBR) has the active flag?
     Edwin

>
>cfdisk seems to allow you to create multiple bootable partitions (of
>course, i didn't try writing that to disk.  maybe cfdisk would pop up an
>error if i did.)
>
>pete
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