How do boot sectors and multiple drives works?

Posted by GiH on Super User See other posts from Super User or by GiH
Published on 2010-02-10T19:23:22Z Indexed on 2010/04/16 11:13 UTC
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Filed under:

mbr

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boot

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multi-boot

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windows-7

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ubuntu-9.04

I don't fully understand the concept of a boot sector, I was hoping someone could clear this up for me.

If you have two hard drives, with an OS installed on each, does each drive have its own boot sector? Does each drive need an MBR partition?

I've got Linux and Windows on two separate drives. I've had issues when installing Linux and grub, and now I've finally decided to use the Windows bootloader to start up. Would Windows have gotten rid of grub when i used /fixmbr or does it stay there on the boot sector of the other drive?

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