Re: Guidance on conflicts between GNU GRUB and proprietary software

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 11:40:13AM -0400, Phillip Susi wrote:
> On 9/28/2010 4:04 AM, Colin Watson wrote:
> >   * The BIOS can often only read from relatively near the start of the
> >     disk, and core.img must be readable by the BIOS.  If some other
> >     operating system is already installed - the common dual-boot case,
> >     and the case where this problem is overwhelmingly most likely to
> >     matter - it's likely to occupy a large stretch of partitioned space
> >     right after the boot track.
> 
> If int13 can't access the whole disk then it does not really matter
> where the grub core image is since it still has to use int13 to load the
> kernel.

This is not true.  GRUB has an ata module which can be built into
core.img if necessary to read data from parts of the disk the BIOS can't
read.  It's not really solid enough to use by default, but people do
occasionally report success with it.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden