Double checking grub-install ??

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Case <billlinux at rogers.com>

| 1) stage1 is one line that is installed on the mbr within the 64 bytes
| or 512 bits that is reserved on the disk for booting purposes.

Boot records are 512 bytes.  The code must fit into about 440 bytes of 
this.

The Master Boot Record (MBR) is the first block on the hard drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbr is worth a read.

Each partition also has a boot record.

The good-old-fashioned code in the MBR looked for the first bootable
primary partition and booted the boot record from that.  "bootable" is
an attribute of a partition table entry that you can set by fdisk(8)
"a" command, for example.  This was the conventional way for switching
which OS to boot.

Note: this does not allow for booting from "logical" partitions.  The
extended partition's can be used -- I've sometimes put LILO or GRUB's
boot record there.

On some systems, boot loaders cannot reach as far into a large drive
as GRUB can.