[NTLUG:Discuss] GRUB boot process

[Leroy Tennison]

Got to thinking about the boot process and came up with a question which 
wasn't clearly (at least to me) addressed in the documentation.

'info grub' says that stage1 is placed in the MBR (or the boot sector of 
the partition), the physical address of stage2 is embedded in stage1 and 
that stage2 contains values for the partition (etc.) and "the name of a 
configuration file"

My assumption (which is also my question) is that stage2 can determine 
the file system type from the partition table, mount that filesystem 
using filesystem-specific methods and then read the embedded 
configuration file to either present a menu or determine the 
kernel/initrd files to use for booting.  Is this correct?

The reason for my question was that there seemed to be a gap in 
explanation between how stage1 found/loaded stage 2 and how stage2 
found/used the menu file.