Problems with dual boot and grub

[Jeff Vian]

Jim Cornette wrote:

> jludwig wrote:
>
>> How does toe BIOS know to go to that partition???
>>
>>  
>>
> The bios will get information from the partition table. For example, 
> you can set the active partition on  hda1,hda2 or hda3 on my setup. 
> They are primary partitions. The active partition is marked with an * 
> for the active partition using fdisk (linux version).
>
> You can't boot from hda4 (extended container) or from hda5 (partition 
> in an extended partition, BIOS is not smart enough to do this.) So you 
> should be able to boot from any partition that you install grub in, as 
> long as it is a primary partition.
>
> Why I have an extended partition that is all used up by linux swap is 
> a bit worthless, but that is the way the installer set it up.
>
You cannot have more than 4 partitions on a drive.  When the 4th 
partition is created it makes it an extended and then creates the 
logical partition inside, thus hda5

> You can set the active partition using the fdisk for windows also. I 
> believe it uses "A" to denote which is the active partition.
>
> Jim
>
>   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *         1      2173  17454591    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda2          2174      2186    104422+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda3          2187      3583  11221402+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda4          3584      3648    522112+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hda5          3584      3648    522081   82  Linux swap
>
>
AFAIK you can only have one "active" partition on a drive, thus only one 
to boot from.