hmm, been a while I asked a question here. Anyway, I was wondering, is there a way to split the boot sector on a separate drive, and the OS on another drive? Just curious

I vaguely recall seeing this being possible but this was a long time ago, and I can't find the exact links where I saw this being possible.

@NordineLotfi Boot sector or /boot directory? EFI or MBR?

@terdon I meant that for EFI/MBR yes :)

@NordineLotfi The two are mutually exclusive :) Anyway, yes, you can have /boot on a Linux system as a separate partition. The boot sector of a drive is on the drive, by definition, so I don't know what you'd want there, but if you mean the bootloader, there is no reason to have that on the same device as the OS, no.

@terdon The goal here is for making a hardware switch, so I can switch between two boot sector, either MBR or GPT, that are on two separate drives, for a multiboot drive I made. There a lot of distros that do not work on either, and I also have different devices that only support one or the other, so being able to do this would make things easier (instead of manually converting MBR to GPT and vice versa, which I already know can be done without formatting)

Ah. In that case, that is well beyond my realm of expertise. Sounds like an interesting question, though, why not ask on the site?

hmm, that's a good idea yeah. I feared this might be downvoted so I asked here just in case

the problem is, I don't know how to write the question in such a way so that it's programming oriented, since I would be mentioning the fact that this is related to an hardware project

I guess I could ask something along the line of "how to separate the boot sector and the OS on separate drives" and then ask if this is possible, and if so, how, so that one could just somehow point the boot sector drive so that it boot with the drive containing the OS

is this good enough as a question if it's framed that way?

@NordineLotfi why would it need to be programming oriented? We're talking about asking on U&L not SO.

@NordineLotfi Yes, I don't see why not.

@terdon True, I just didn't want to make this too much hardware related :)

@terdon got you, thanks for the heads up

It isn't, at all. MBR is a software thing, after all. go for it!