[NTLUG:Discuss] cfdisk and bootable partition flag

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 10:50:33AM -0600, ntlug at levelofdetail.com wrote:
> I'm on a Linux-only machine using SUSE 9.2. I boot from the first of two
> IDE hard disks - /dev/hda.
> 
> I'm not currently having a problem, but am trying to understand the boot
> process better. I've tried both fdisk and cfdisk and in neither one do I
> get an indication of which is the bootable partition on the drive. Why
> is this? How can I find which partition I'm booting from?

I'm not an expert on this, but assuming you have a reasonably standard
Linux installation then you're probably booting into "grub" and it's 
installed on the drive's "Master Boot Record" (MBR), which is separate
from the partitions on the drive.

If this is the case, then it's up to grub to decide which partition
to boot, and grub gets that information from its grub.conf file (or
command-line options specified when booting) and not from anything 
that is stored in the partition table.

Hope this helps,

Pm