So does anyone think that BIOS could somehow be stopping Grub from booting his Windows partition just because it is not the active partition? Because that is not the experience of myself or most of my friends. Thanks in advance for any help.
Can BIOS limitation prevent Windows from booting if no boot flag set?
Started by
caljohn
, Sep 05 2008 07:31 PM
#1
Posted 05 September 2008 - 07:31 PM
So does anyone think that BIOS could somehow be stopping Grub from booting his Windows partition just because it is not the active partition? Because that is not the experience of myself or most of my friends. Thanks in advance for any help.
#2
Posted 06 September 2008 - 04:29 PM
As a general rule the active partition is the one that gets loaded first unless the desire is overridden in some fashion. This is effectively the closest one gets to having boot flags and its an area that has nothing to do with the BIOS.
You quite often find that custom BIOSes such as those made for HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, etc - anything with a built-in recovery partition - have their own ways of forcing the system to load from somewhere else other than the default active partition.
In days of old, Windows 95, 98 and ME required you to have an active partition (and for one or the other to be the only OS on the machine - officially anyway) otherwise none of them would load. These days its possible to set a system up to boot from any partition you care to mention regardless of whether its active, primary, logical or anything providing you provide a way to get to them from the active partition in a Windows environment.
Grub, being a bootloader, is irrelevant of the BIOS. The BIOS finishes what it does then tries to load an operating system off anything it can find. Once its done that that's the end of it so I don't see how a BIOS limitation can even be involved as by this point the BIOS is finished.
You quite often find that custom BIOSes such as those made for HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, etc - anything with a built-in recovery partition - have their own ways of forcing the system to load from somewhere else other than the default active partition.
In days of old, Windows 95, 98 and ME required you to have an active partition (and for one or the other to be the only OS on the machine - officially anyway) otherwise none of them would load. These days its possible to set a system up to boot from any partition you care to mention regardless of whether its active, primary, logical or anything providing you provide a way to get to them from the active partition in a Windows environment.
Grub, being a bootloader, is irrelevant of the BIOS. The BIOS finishes what it does then tries to load an operating system off anything it can find. Once its done that that's the end of it so I don't see how a BIOS limitation can even be involved as by this point the BIOS is finished.
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