Michael Lotz wrote a nice post yesterday.

After succeeding in building a native GCC 4.3.3 compiler for Haiku he now posted a kind of a FAQ article aimed at answering a recurring question about making device bootable for being used with Haiku images.

The article explains also mechanics of the Haiku boot logic and is very interresting.

A little summary:

Haiku stage one boot loader is splited accross two 512 bytes sectors (too big to fit into only one).

When you boot the computer, the BIOS loads only the first sector by itself so the code in that sector should be able to load the second 512 bytes sector by itself.

Problem is the loader cannot know by itself where the second sector is (for sure) and it is where makebootable come into play. It (makebootable) writes in some bytes of the first sector of stage one boot loader where exactly on the disk it (that first sector) is located.  With that information, the code is informed that the second sector can be found at the “+1” position, just after the stored location.

More (thrilling :-) information is to be found in Michael Lotz’s article.

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