title: How does GRUB's stage 1 boot loader loads the stage 2 bootloader?
body: <p>From the past week I am puzzled with the question that how the grub first stage boot loader which is only 446 bytes is able to search for the second stage, when the second stage is in a complex file system! How does it locate the second stage?</p>
  
  <p>When a complex partitioning scheme of windows and linux is in place, and the linux system is entirely in the extended partition, then how does the stage 1 finds the stage 2? Even stage 1.5?</p>
  
  <p>All of the grub tutorials skim through this important part. I have searched though the internet but couldn't find anything that explains this. Sadly, I am not an assembly programmer.</p>
  
  <p><strong>I want to understand the boot process intricately in terms of which sectors of the hard disk are tickled (and roughly how) during bootup. *<em>Please point me to a good resource or answer here.</strong> It will greatly help me to play with grub wisely.</em>*</p>
  
  <p>Some Resources Searched:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>How Linux Works : What every superuser should know by Brian Ward</li>
  <li><a href="http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html</a></li>
  <li>some past stackoverflow questions.</li>
  </ol>