Why parted shouldn't write to random fields in disk labels

[John Gilmore]

I've seen this problem discussed on this list before, where installing
Fedora Core 2 makes a separate Windows partition stop booting because
the CHS fields in the MBR got clobbered:

  http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

The proposal to "fix" this involves writing some kind of random
numbers into every MBR so we or the kernel can tell one disk from
another, as I understand it.

Solving a problem that was caused by writing a field that we never use
and didn't need to write (in a structure shared by all OS's that
access the disk), by writing and then using a different field that we
never before needed to read or write, seems to me likely to compound,
rather than fix, the existing problem.

        John