Re: GRUB and ntldr

[Molle Bestefich]

Thomas Schweikle wrote:
> adrian15 schrieb:
> > title Windows
> > root (hd0,0)
> > chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr
(No need for hd0,0 since that's root)
> > boot
>
> This doesn't work, since ntldr isn't a supported binary type.
> GRUB refuses to load it this way.

But it will happily load a boot sector using block list notation?
Doesn't sound right.

> > B) Another question. Why are you interested in loading ntldr manually?

Here's another reason why it would be pretty cool.

It often happens that Windows 2000/XP fails to boot, showing just a
blank screen.

I've seen it happen when:
 - Installing on a large (eg. 50 GB) NTFS volume with lots of data on
it already.
 - Moving a disk from one system to another, where the moved-to system
uses a different LBA<->CHS translation scheme.

I'm unsure whether it's the volume boot sector or NTLDR that hangs,
but if Grub could load NTLDR, I guess I'd have an answer to that
question pretty soon ;-).

I think I've read somewhere that the volume boot sector only loads 1
sector of NTLDR, after which NTLDR loads the rest of itself, maybe
using CHS calls.  Would be pretty cool to be able to skip that step
and just use Grub to LBA load NTLDR to the right place in memory and
call whatever location that's supposed to be run when it's all loaded.