[NTLUG:Discuss] cfdisk and bootable partition flag

ntlug@levelofdetail.com ntlug at levelofdetail.com
Wed Jan 11 16:43:13 CST 2006


Thanks, Patrick. Yes, that helps. I should have mentioned it is a
standard install with Grub.

I have another machine with Ubuntu on it. It also uses Grub, standard
install, booting one OS only. The boot partition is indicated by both
fdisk and cfdisk. On this machine I can't find grub.conf anywhere - not
in /etc or /boot. There is a /boot/grub directory but no conf file in
it.

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 13:06 -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 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





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