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Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 11:25:28 -0700 To: svlug@svlug.org Subject: Re: [svlug] gui lilo..? From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> begin Bill Jonas quotation: > Last I checked, the MBR was still 512 bytes. Not that you asked for this sort of ridiculously over-detailed further elaboration, but: Sector 0's 512 total bytes are divided into 446 bytes available for initial boot code (called by the Int 13h boot service), followed by four 16-byte records for the (64-byte) partition table, and then two bytes left over at the end (which NT disk administrator uses for "disk signatures"). Yr. welcome. === Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 17:31:35 -0700 From: Marc MERLIN <marc_news@valinux.com> To: Greg Herlein <gherlein@herlein.com> Cc: svlug@svlug.org Subject: Re: [svlug] About lilo fitting in the MBR On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 06:54:56AM -0700, Greg Herlein wrote: > > Last I checked, the MBR was still 512 bytes. > > Yes, yet another technical reason - the exact size that lilo has > to fit into - why the proposed graphical lilo is not going to > work. Of course, you could make a new boot loader (like > OS/2's) that has to have a separate partition of it's own, I > suppose.... but it's not written yet. Actually, lilo doesn't fit in the MBR, the MBR code has just enough to bootstrap the second stage loader, which has to be read block by block from the hard drive, just like the kernel itself. This is why you need to re-run lilo when you change your lilo.conf, to update those blockmap tables. In other words, adding whatever amount of code to lilo at this point (GUI or other) doesn't make a difference. ===