Single-OS Boot Loaders
Figure 4.1 illustrates a single-OS boot process. You can think of both the MBR and Partition 1's boot sector as containing single-OS boot loaders. These boot loaders, unlike the ones I describe in the rest of this chapter, are hard-coded to boot a single OS. By default, most versions of DOS and Windows 9x ship with and install single-OS boot loaders. OS/2 can also be configured in this way. Many other OSs, including Windows NT, Linux, and BeOS, ship with boot loaders that are more capable but that can be configured to behave as if they were single-OS boot loaders.
Most OSs rely on a unique boot sector. For example, Linux's boot sector won't boot DOS, and DOS's boot sector won't boot Linux. For this reason, many OSs overwrite ...
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