Booting problem

Joerg Sonnenberger joerg at britannica.bec.de
Sat Aug 14 08:33:55 PDT 2004


On Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 07:17:54PM +0400, Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:
> Two questions still though: (1) How did this work? As in, I always
> assumed (mistakenly?) that the kernel had something special about it and
> so one couldn't pass any other file as a kernel. And now that I am able
> to pass off the loader file as a kernel, either the loader is special or
> there's nothing special about the kernel ... (2) Why didn't my previous
> attempt at chainloading work anyways? Is it not supposed to work -- was
> I doing things wrong? :-/

The kernel command tells GRUB to use the normal executable magic. It expects
an ELF image and depending on the OS chooses a strategy to run it. Because
/boot/loader and /kernel have the same type, this works fine.

Chainloading does load a single 512 byte sector and jumps to the start, which
of course is the ELF cookie and doesn't work therefore.

I thought you already read the GRUB docu, which descripted how to load
FreeBSD using kernel :) Otherwise I would have mentioned it directly.

> Am finally able to boot into DragonFly using GRUB! Yipee!! 

Have fun :)

Joerg

> 
> Thanks,
> Rakhesh
> 





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