Eric W. Biederman wrote:
The BOOT_IDE driver has been modified in strange ways to find things in the first partition and I have not had a chance to look over the code to see what is going on there yet.
Not strange to me, by default it simply skips 63x512 bytes (0x7e00), which is normally for most disks today where partition 1 starts. Of course, it should read and decode the partition table, but this is much harder.
-Steve