Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 97211
Stated usage of active partition flag is misleading
Last modified: 2014-08-04 18:23:51 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020919 IBM Web Browser for OS/2 Description of problem: On page 108 a sentence reads: The "active" flag is used by some operating systems' boot loaders. This is possibly correct, but misleading. The "active" flag is actually used by the computer's BIOS to select which hard disk primary partition to boot. The contents of that partition may be an operating system boot loader or an operating system selection program such as GRUB, LILO or OS/2 Boot Manager. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Read page 108 2. 3. Additional info:
As I got further into the installation I realized I didn't give the correct interpretation either. In section 3.20.1 the book correctly states that the MBR, not the active partition, is the code loaded by the BIOS. I think the description on page 108 should connect the two ideas. All MBRs that I know of, except those supplied with Linux, use the "active" flag to determine which partition to boot. Operating system selectors such as OS/2 Boot Manager take up a partition and reside in the one marked active. Some selectors such as GRUB and LILO apparently are different in that they can reside entirely or partially in the MBR. I say partially because the MBR isn't very big and I wonder if that much function will fit.
Thanks again for the feedback. I'll work with the original author of this content to clarify this as well as relate it back to the partitioning information earlier in the Installation Guide. Cheers, Sandra