Alternative booting

[David Krings]

Les wrote:
> I am confused... What is the reason that you don't wish to use the means
> of the MBR?  The hardware resets to zero, this forces the drive seek,
> the first sector is read and action is taken from there.  To my
> knowledge, there are several other ways to perform this bootstrapping,
> but this is the most flexible.  Otherwise the firmware must know in
> advance the record to look for, and if any means other than a specific
> track and sector, the firmware would have to know how to read and
> interpret the disk structure, which would make the firmware useful to
> only one OS, and more specifically to only one disk format.  This would
> then prevent booting from anything except one disk form, unless the
> firmware included a large number of formats, such as one for USB Flash,
> one for CD Roms, one for DVD roms, one for Floppies, one for tape....
> well, you get the point... eventually the firmware would need upgrading
> quite often, every time a new device or format became available.  As
> much as people hate software updates, just think if they had to "flash"
> the bios more frequently?

It is not that I am hellbent on not using the MBR, quite the opposite, 
it is my desired way of booting for the bazillion reason you listed. It 
is just that GRUB is extremely flakey when installed on the MBR on my 
RAID array. I wouldn't have even posted twice about this problem if GRUB 
would a) work and b) just do its job. But it doesn't and that one 
hardware that really isn't exotic by any means.

I got a full F7 install on the second primary partition on the SATA 
RAID1 array. I want to boot this one. GRUB doesn't do it, so I need to 
find something else or ditch Linux entirely and hope that some clever 
developers puts a fix into GRUB or any other boot loader.

What BIOS really should do is allow for a device driver and boot loader 
to be added including some basic UI to make changes to it. In that case, 
it doesn't matter which drive or format is used and it may even make the 
  MBR and file tables to be in a smart spot (the middle of the drive) 
than on the most volatile place of a disc. Geez, even the Commodore 1541 
did a better job at that.
Yes, one would need to adjust it for any hardware or partition changes, 
but at least one could get to it. Not as it is right now. The MBR 
approach is ingherently flawed, but for many good and bad reasons we are 
stuck with it.

OK, before we drift off into fundamental discussions and have even more 
people hijack this thread, is there anyone out there who can give an 
answer to my question and not tell me which issues they have and that I 
am a lunatic for not using MBR? Thanks.