It's better then any other operating system out there. Ever try installing Windows on a spare partition with another non-windows operating system installed on the computer? Dual booting is garrenteed not to work 100% of the time. You have ot go in an manually muck around with the Windows bootloader and it's a PITA.
Linux's bootloader stuff may suck, but it's vastly better then any other operating system anywere.
I understand that, it was just a statement that I made as to my understanding of the OS or any part of it.
I did not know that Linux was so fragile that it could not survive a change like I made.
It appears that there is no way to clone a install from one drive to another without being stuck in the position where the cloning took place. If I clone from master to slave the new drive is then forever stuck in as a slave, not a good thing.
I am not going to read up on bootloaders, you see I am 72 years old and just trying to find a way to keep the machines that I have built somewhat up to date without spending money on windows.
It did survive.
How it works during bootup:
1. System is powered.
2. System POSTS
3. System's BIOS kicks in, does some hardware mucking around.
4. The BIOS reads the first 512k of the harddrive disk and executes it. (the MBR) Out of that the first half of that 512k or so is the actual boot loader. If your using Grub then that is the 'first stage' of the bootloader
.
5. The grub first stage is to go and read the 'second stage' of Grub from your /boot partition (or /boot directory on your root partition if root and boot are one and the same)
6. The second stage reads the menu.lst configuration file from your harddrive and then usually provides you a selection of boot options. It also provides a rudimentary shell so you can manually specify boot options in case the configuration file gets corrupted or has a bug with it.
(also there is a 1.5 stage for grub, that I am not sure about.)
7. Grub times out or you select a option it will then load the Linux kernel, then load the initrd file. The initrd file is a compressed ram-based file system that is stored in your /boot directory. The initrd is designed to make it so that it can do additional driver and disk configuration stuff. Anything that needs to be done before the kernel can start using the boot device or network share or whatever your booting up with.
This is done because you may want to setup LVM, EVMS, DMraid, and/or MD software raid and other special configurations for your root device. Also it allows distros to create generic kernels that run on the most amount of hardware possible. Initrd is generally generated at install time or when you update your kernel and will hold any drivers you need to setup your hardware for booting the system.
8. The kernel executes the init file or whatever is being used and the initrd is used to setup everything. After it's finished with it's scripts it'll mount your partition or whatnot and setup /dev directories, and mount any other virtual file systems you may need (sysfs, proc) and performs a 'pivot root' to switch to the harddrive.
9. The init program then begins to read the /etc/inittab file and begins executing scripts in the various runlevels. Thos scripts are designed it to finish setting up your hardware, start up any services you need, and sets up networking. And eventually it will provide you with a login prompt.
10. AFter it's finished running the init scripts then your system should be fully functional and you can log in and use it.
With your system grub stage 2 or 1.5 was successfully loaded, but the drive numbering changed or something like that.. which would cause error 16. Obviously you undid your change and got it working.
Usually you can fix something like this by booting up a live linux cdrom like Knoppix and manually using a chroot environment to reinstall the bootloader. Some distros (like Fedora) will provide a rescue cdrom to help you do that.
If you google around for it you can find examples on how to use knoppix (or other live cd) to reinstall a Linux bootloader from a chroot environment. However if your not comfortable with that and there is no real data you want to save on your system then a reinstall may be faster.
edit:
If a Linux install goes sour and your using XP or Win2k then you can usually use the Windows cdrom to access the 'recovery console' and perform the 'fixmbr' command from there.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu...cs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058/
It's not a 100% given though and you need to make sure that you can get into recovery console beforehand. Not all OEM disks will support that sort of thing (or most won't. I don't know).