GRUB, MBR and NTLDR confusion

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> writes:

> To reply to your question, the MSFT boot loader is most unlikely to 
> ever boot Linux. It would need to read and understand ext2, ext3 and 
> reiser at a minumum to know where the kernel was, either at boot time 
> in the style of a grub stage 1.5, or install time in the style 
> of /sbin/lilo.

Yeah, that sure sounds right.  (My memory of seeing it done must have
been confused with the following scheme.)

> A simple chain load mechanism is the best we could hope for from the 
> MSFT boot code - read and execute the boot sector on an arb partition 
> selected by the user from a boot menu. However, does it do this? Can 
> it do this? I have never seen or heard of anything that suggests this 
> apart from the one case above. I prefer to go with the 
> well-documented, understandable solution that grub provides.

A similar, effectively-the-same, and reasonably easy scheme which
boots a Linux partition (usually lilo or grub) is documented at

   http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/ntldr.php

Instead of ntldr booting the Linux partition's boot sector from the
disk, ntldr boots a copy of that sector which you've saved as
C:\bootsect.lnx or such.