Strange booting problem

[jd1008]

On 07/01/2015 04:32 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 3:39 PM, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 07/01/2015 03:14 PM, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>>> On 2015-06-30 19:01, jd1008 wrote:
>>>> So, how can I proceed with a brand new drive,
>>>> dd /dev/zero into the first ... say 4K bytes, partition
>>>> it with fdisk, do not mark any partition bootable, so
>>>> that bios will skip over it ?
>>> Don't know why no one's mentioned this, but... you could always just
>>> install an actual bootloader on the drive that boots from the device
>>> from which you really want to boot. (I think you can do this with grub...)
>>>
>>> Of course, plugging that drive into any other computer might make for an
>>> interesting experience :-).
>>>
>> I am sorry - but ...
>> the design and implementation of the traditional
>> (msdos) scheme and ( from what I understand so far
>> from all the respondents), even gpt, effectively render
>> the disk to have a signature which BIOS interprets
>> as a valid partition table AND as bootable, and thus
>> hangs there looking for what does not exist.
>>
>> Why the design mixed 2 different things into 1, I have
>> no idea. But AFAIAC, it sucks and blows atthe same time.
> Well, MBR stands for master boot record. It stands to reason, in the
> epoch in which it and BIOS were invented, that you'd only use MBR if
> you want to boot a system.
>
> Once computers and drives got cheap enough, and in particular drives
> got big enough, is when the mortal user with a budget usurped MBR to
> do only partitioning.
So, let me ask a simple question.
Technically (I mean programatically), how difficult is it to
fix both BIOS and fdisk so that unless a partition is marked
as bootable, the partition table will not contain the boot signature
and BIOS will still accept the partitioning scheme, but
move on to the next drive in the boot order?

Thanx.