secondary boot loader: I think I'm mixed up here. I thought a secondary boot loader would be something like loadlin which lets you boot Linux from Windows (after Windows is running). However, I see other discussions that talk about the primary boot loader being part of the MBR (the first 446 bytes), and it calls a secondary boot loader like LILO, GRUB, Partition Commander (or its boot loader) which most of us think of as the primary boot loader.

Just some other notes: MBR is the first sector (512 bytes) on track 0 of the active partition. Is that also called the boot sector? The partition table is the last 66 bytes of the partition table, consisting of 16 bytes of information for each primary partition. The last two bytes are a "magic word" (I saw the value once) that indicates the disk has been initialized. (I should move some of this to other definitions, including initialize.

See:

• http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue42/tag/2.html
• bootloader -- that page and this require some work -- once I get that page in a little better shape I should fix this page to correspond with it

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 03 Feb 2002
• <If you edit this page, add your name here, move this to the next line>