MBR Screenshots

Here are some shots of the MBR being booted from within Bochs, which is a PC emulator. Everything up to the "Booting from Hard Disk" message is just the BIOS starting up. First, we have the MBR displaying its logo while waiting to be interrupted before going ahead and booting a partition.
Showing logo
If you don't get in quickly enough, it will go ahead and boot the active partition, which in this case has LILO installed.
Booting default
Pressing SHIFT or CTRL will interrupt the MBR and cause it to display its prompt.
Showing prompt
Pressing the "F" key will select a floppy boot. I've put a Grub boot disk in the drive.
Floppy boot
We might instead have pressed the "A" key which goes into advanced mode. This allows partitions which are not active to be booted. It even allows empty partitions to be booted, so be careful.
Advanced mode


Neil Turton
Last modified: Sat Mar 13 16:22:03 GMT 2004