Lecture #3 Boot Loaders and Booting

Agenda

  1. Review
  2. Overview of System Architecture
  3. Create a bootdisk using mkbootdisk
  4. Exercise: Use the dd command to:
  5. Demonstration of a system booting.
  6. Create a GRUB boot disk
  7. Boot a unix system into single user (maintenance) mode.
  8. Exercise: Install CentOS:

Assignment

  1. Finish reading Chapter 2 pages 32 - 42 on booting.
    Be able to answer the following questions:
    1. How is the Master Boot Record (MBR) different from a partition boot record?
    2. What is meant by a stage 2 boot loader?
    3. What is similar about the LILO and GRUB boot loaders? What is different?
  2. Do Lab 2
    Here is a HowTo with screenshots for this lab done on a Fedora System.

Boot Loaders and Booting

PowerPoint Slides
  1. Boot Sequence
    1. BIOS
    2. MBR Bootloader
    3. Boot Partition bootloader
    4. Secondary bootloader (optional)
    5. Kernel load
    6. Mount root filesystem
    7. Turn control over to an init program
  2. Boot Loaders
    1. MS-DOS boot loader - no configuration file - noninteractive
    2. Syslinux - syslinux.cfg
    3. LILO - /etc/lilo.conf
          Requires the running of the lilo command to create a map file
    4. GRUB - /boot/grub/grub.conf
          Capable of reading many UNIX file systems including ext2
  3. The dd Command

Relevant Commands and Files

Commands Files
grub      - GRand Unified Bootloader /boot/grub/grub.conf
lilo      - LInux LOader /etc/lilo.conf
fdisk     - disk partitioning  
dd        - dumps data to devices  
xxd       - displays data in hexadecimal format  
mkbootdisk- creates an emergency bootdisk /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8