Re: Boot.ini question

Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
Folkert Rienstra wrote:


Disks aren't booted by their controllers, they are booted by the
Mainboard BIOS. If some disks can't be booted then that's because the
MoBo bios doesn't allow it. It's not the controller BIOS fault.


Ok... dunno, but maybe not relevant for my point.

Just as a reminder: the whole discussion started when Timothy claimed that
the rdisk number is the position in the "hard drive boot order", as he
calls it.

How would you then calculate the rdisk number out of the "hard drive boot
order" for disks that can't be booted (independently of why exactly that
is)? Do they appear in the "hard drive boot order" even though they can't
be booted? If not, how would one get their rdisk number with Timothy's
method?

Gerhard


rdisk() number is the ordinal of the drive on the specific controller. You can search Microsoft for this info.

The BIOS boot disk order is the order the drives are scanned for a bootable (active) partition.

Once the BIOS has loaded code from the drive found in the boot order and passes control to that code, it is done with its role in the boot process. (That drive would have to have an active partition with appropriate code on it.)

If that code that was loaded is a boot manager (grub, lilo, ntldr, or whatever), it (the code) can then load other code from from the same partition, or another partition on on a different drive.

That code can be an operating system, or another boot loader.

Once code for an operating system is loaded into memory and starts execution, then the loading of the operating system can complete.





.

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