Project : "WhereTo?"

- Learn about BOOTING

99/01/01
I've been lazy or i didn't have the time. Anyway, for now, i've got the sanity for new articles(maybe). The topic is about "Booting".
A few years ago, few people needed multibooting capabilities. And those few did it on their own. But these days, it's kind of semi-necessary since lots of incompatible(on the booting side) OSes are coming out. Linux, Windows NT, Windows 98, OS/2(it's alive guyz:), BE-OS, et cetera. You might think, "well i'm gonna use linux's lilo" or "Me? I use only 2 OSes so i'll just stick to the Windows NT's boot selector". How about this one. OS Boot Select(abbriv. OS-BS). You can visit Boot Manager. One sad thing is that you need to pay for the product(meaning NOT FREE! - just in case your not good at english like me :). Long ago - can't remember how long - it WAS a free product. During the preliminary stages that is.
A good start for wanna-learn-booting people is the sources of free OSes. Most OS contain booting snippets, and they are a great source. I won't mention those heaps of OS-related link lists since they are more than plenty in the famous search engines. Just type in "OS" for the search keyword and TA-DA. For the lazy, here's a good one: Operating Systems on the Web by Sven M. Paas.
GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader. It's a project for making a multibooting bootloader which origniated from the GNU HURD project. Erich Boleyn started this project and extended it with his self written boot proposal which is interesting enough(and implemented in Mach4 and others).
Another thing i recommend is the linux0.0.1 source code. It's coded in "AS" so most people could have difficulties but, it's worth a look. Documentations on linux's LILO are available too.
Some of you would have faced a common problem with physical damage on the first sector of a floppy(or a hard) disk. You can still use the disk but you can't use it as a bootable disk. It's because the boot sector is damaged. The BIOS is the first to gain power of the computer, but after that an interrupt 19h(called the bootstrap loader) gives the power to whatever that resides in the first physical sector. After that, Everything is up to the OS itself(a place for standards to fit). Take a look at the Interrupt List by Ralf Brown. It has explanations of most topics. Try looking up interrupt 19h. Hale Landis's How To Series are another great source of information with lots of additional articles. It teaches things like MBR, Partition table, and more.