My understanding was that when a PC boots from a hard drive, it reads and runs a short program from the MBR. On a Windows PC, this program looks for the partition with the boot flag set and uses that partition to continue the boot process. On a Linux machine this program will usually be GRUB, and will offer a boot menu. But on a new hard drive, the MBR will be all zeroes and an attempt to boot it will fail. So I need to put some program on the MBR if the machine is to boot successfully.
ergotia's asked me to install Ubuntu on the machine as well, so I might end up using GRUB, but I wanted to know what my options were if I wanted to do things the standard Windows way.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: for free
Date: 2010-06-20 10:44 am (UTC)Many thanks for your help so far!