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 ????.
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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.
