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I don't fully understand the concept of a boot sector, I was hoping someone could clear this up for me.
If you have two hard drives, with an OS installed on each, does each drive have its own boot sector? Does each drive need an MBR partition?
I've got Linux and Windows on two separate drives. I've had issues when installing Linux and grub, and now I've finally decided to use the Windows bootloader to start up. Would Windows have gotten rid of grub when i used /fixmbr or does it stay there on the boot sector of the other drive?
Thanks for that very detailed answer :-)... I was always wondering why MBR was being used for two different meanings, and now I know haha – GiH – 2010-02-13T19:10:14.287
1@GiH you're welcome. thanks for asking this question; it can serve as a basic intro to MBRs & bootloaders for future readers. – quack quixote – 2010-02-13T19:30:18.167
do you have a source for "The term Master Boot Record is often used to refer to two things -- it is properly only the first, and commonly misapplied to the second:" I'm sure it's right, and i've read it somewhere.. but interesting if you have a source for that. Also, since here's a term for bootloader, is there a term for the non-bootloader part of the MBR? And when it comes to GPT, does GPT include bootloader and partition table, and what terminology distinguishes between GPT and the partition table? – barlop – 2013-05-29T04:07:29.930