Thanks you Stephen and Bart; The responses you have provided clarify some of the issues. On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 07:37 -0400, Stephen Gregory wrote: > On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 11:40:50PM -0400, William Case wrote: > > > Rhetorical question; how? Real question. Should there be a data sheet > > or some documentation that tells me how the firmware for my machine's > > BIOS works? Or, is my search fruitless because that info is > > proprietary? > > > It is unlikely you will find the full documentation for your > motherboard. However you will likely find the documentation for every > chip on the motherboard. You can get the cpu and chipset documentation > for AMD and Intel. Last I checked it was free of charge to get the > PDFs. I suspect Nvidia publishes their chipset documentation as well > but I have not looked for it. In those documents you will find > intrecate detail of what has to happen to initilize those chips. > > While you could grab Intel's System Integrators manual (vol 1 through > n) I would recommend against it. You will be instantly > overwelmed. Today's computers are complicated beasts. Instead go grab > some old computer architechture books from the library. A booked that > covered the 8088/8086 would be a bonus but just about any cpu > architechture will be fine. I have downloaded PDFs for Intel (I used to have an Intel motherboard and CPU) and AMD (My new chip -- all 649 pages). I will see what I can get for ASUS motherboards and NVIDIA. Besides the general knowledge of how booting takes place at the non-abstract level; I am trying to find out how drives and partitions get named/located before the OS is loaded. fdisk calls the harddisk and partition "major" and "minor"; Grub uses hd0,0 or whatever. (Not yet sure they are the same thing.) This gets translated by Linux when it is finally booted into /dev/sda1 or whatever. I am trying to figure out at the hardware level, what is the first name/location of a disk as known to BIOS and how does that translated into major and minor; hd0,0; and then /dev/sda1? I have the code for Grub that shows the final step; hd0,0 ==> sda1. Ignore the above blathering; just writing a response to re-clarify in my own mind what I am looking for. Don't think I am nuts. I'll get there. -- Regards Bill