Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3506 mails)

[Darryl Gregorash <raven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 17/09/06 12:45, Paul Abrahams wrote:
> <snip>
>
>I think that something on my system is corrupted, but I don't know what.  A 
>likely villain is the stage1 file, since that file sets up the reading for 
>the later stages.  Do you know where that one comes from and/or how it is 
>generated?
There is a template file /boot/grub/stage1 that is used during grub
installation to generate the stage 1 code that resides in the MBR. It
understands no file systems, so everything has to be referred to in
block list format. Stage 1 records the location of the stage 1.5 file
and is responsible to load it. That is all stage 1 does.

The stage 1.5 file can be in the sectors immediately following the MBR
or in the boot record of the root partition. Actually, "the" file is a
misnomer, because you have a different one for each file system: ls
/boot/grub/*stage1_5.

See "info grub", section on grub images for more detail.