Re: Grub and the VSTa filesystem

Andy Valencia wrote:

> ["Thomas J. Erdos" <erdost@usxchange.net> writes:]
>
> >The question is now, how does the first stage bootloader, - which is only 512
> >bytes big, and does not know about filesystems- where to find stage2, that
> >might be stored on a harddrive, as a file on a filesystem, is much bigger
> >than 512 bytes, has the knowledge about the filesystem, and the blocks need
> >not succeed each other.
>
> I suspect one could pad the stage2 with (512-320) bytes, and then have the
> bmap'ing of it ignore the first block. So the "real" stage2 contents would
> start at offset 0 in a 512 byte block, and that block would be the first one
> mapped in stage1's list of blocks. It'd be a little screwy, but it should
> do the job....
>
> Andy Valencia

I have to appologize to Gary, but when I read his e-mail it was too late, and I
didn't really paid much attention what he said so I didn't explaind the real
problem. Now Andy suggests the same thing.

The problem with this solution is that the same subroutines in the stage2 read
the menu.lst file , the kernel and the modules the same way. That means the first
(512-320) bytes must be filled with comments for the menu.lst and the kernel and
modules have to be modified and recompiled the same way like the stage2 file.
Again - if I didn't explain it clearly- the same subroutines are used once at the
installation to read in and mark the blocks used by the stage2 file on the
filesystem and once at startup when the menu.lst, the kernel and the modules are
read into the memory.
If any questions left unanswered, I hope I can return an answere.

Thomas J. Erdos
Received on Sun Aug 1 14:36:17 1999