Sparda Posted February 2, 2007 Share Posted February 2, 2007 well im not 100% but from what i understand, it goes on the first sector of you disk and directs the mobo on which OS to boot. Ye, that's about right. The first 512 bytes on any given disk is (supposed to be) the boot sector. It's quite rare now that the boot loader is actually located in the boot sector. It's is common place for the boot sector to contain a jump instruction (which can also be accompanied by code that instructs the BIOS how to read the FS) which points the motherboards BIOS to a different place on the HD which actually does contain the boot loader. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G-Stress Posted February 3, 2007 Author Share Posted February 3, 2007 Excellent. I think all that was covered in the A+ area, but it's been forever since I done that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G-Stress Posted February 7, 2007 Author Share Posted February 7, 2007 Ok guys, I got it tri-booting now, but am curious about something. First of all I re-installed BT so I could write to that partition and configure lilo, but lilo ended up being already installed and configured I just had to add my other entries. My setup: /dev/sda1 = Vista /dev/sda2 = XP /dev/sda3 = BT So I added the lines other = /dev/sda1 label = Vista other = /dev/sda2 label = WindowsXP Now when selecting Vista it loaded the Vista boot loader and gave me the options to boot vista or XP. However if I select XP from the lilo menu I get ntldr missing which kinda makes sense I guess since Vista is now the boot loader for windows. I guess im curious if possible to eliminate the Vista boot loader and just have lilo boot vista and XP directly? I did delete the XP entry since I can get there through Vista's boot loader. I was reading some pretty interesting info on wikipedia about Boot loaders and got a pretty good understanding now. It seems that the last OS installed their boot loader overwrites any exsisting or somehow it can be written to a certain area on a partition, but when installing BT it only gave me pretty much one option to write the mbr :? I'm able to boot all 3 OS'es so im happy but i'd like to only use lilo if anyone is willing to share any advice. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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