LinuxQuestions.org - MBR - musings on Linux vs Windows

Seems recently we have seen a lot of threads bumping into problems with boot-loaders/partitioning/re-installing.

Decided to have a play and see if Redmont was really the problem.
Haven't tested everything, but here are my notes from this afternoon on a new box.

Quote:

New box, had had XP on it at the shop - was deleted prior to delivery.
- hda had one fat32 partition occupying all 80Gig
- sda had one NTFS partition occupying all 80Gig
Both MBRs saved to floppy.

zero'd first 446 bytes of hda MBR - XP installer worked no worries.
zero'd all 512 bytes of hda MBR - XP installer worked no worries. Recognised as unformatted, and offered to partition it.

fdisk on Linux *failed* - "Unable to open /dev/hda"
cfdisk on Linux *failed* - "FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk"

This is crap - code looks like it is looking for sig bytes 0xAA55
Testing confirmed - zero'd everything but the last 2 bytes, and fdisk worked.
Also cfdisk.

BAD - broken as designed
Should be worth a bug report - why is 0x0000 considered critical ????.

There are a few other things I want to test - I'll look at creating a patch for fdisk and raising a bug report.
More to come in all likelihood.