Musings

Now that Fedora 16 (Verne) is in beta, many early adapters are encountering GRUB2, GPT and BIOS Boot partitions for the first time. The concept behind a BIOS Boot partition is not something particularly new. On BIOS-based computers, boot loaders images are larger than can be fitted on a single disk block or two. To overcome this inherent limitation, boot loaders are often split into a number of stages. For instance, GRUB Legacy has Stage1 code that lives in bytes 0 to 445 of the MBR, i.e. LBA0 (Logical Block Address), of a disk, and other code that lives in