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

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

John Gilmore <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

Who's "we"?

> 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.

You understand neither the problem nor the solution.  Thanks for your
input, though.

 - Pat