[CLUE-Cert] Answers to some of the questions from last meeting

[Lynn Danielson]

Dennis Perkins wrote:
> I have a couple of comments regarding the discussion of the boot
> process two weeks ago.  I double-checked and the MBR only takes
> one sector, not two. I also found that the partition table resides
> in the same sector.

Thank you for following up on this.  I was pretty sure that this was
the case, but a couple people in the group seemed certain it was two
sectors.

> ....  The kernel does load the root partition.
> Otherwise, it would not be able to find init and the boot scripts.

Good point.  The root device is a modifiable kernel parameter which
can be set with the rdev command. 

> But one of the boot scripts remounts the root partition as read-only > in order to run fsck on it.  If everything is ok, it remounts it
> again, this time as read-write.  It then runs fsck on the other
> partitions listed in /etc/fsck.

Do you mean /etc/fstab?  The sixth field of fstab specifies the order
that the filesystems should be checked by fsck at boot time.  The root
filesystem should always be the first one.

Does anyone know what the dump field (field five of fstab) is for?

Lynn