Re: parted 1.4.20 and FreeDOS

[Andrew Clausen]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 08:18:50AM +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Andrew Clausen <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Can you please send me the first 16k of the disk?
> > 
> >         dd if=/dev/sda of=freedos.img bs=16k count=1
> 
> Here it comes:

Thanks.  It turns out, that partition 4 (which doesn't exist) has the
boot indicator set (i.e. the first byte set to 0x80).  This is broken.

Now, Parted assumes that if the partition table is broken in some kinds
of ways (including this one), *and* there is non-zeros on sector 1,
then there is probably a pc98 table, so the msdos probe deliberately
fails.  (It's *really* hard to tell pc98 and msdos tables apart)

So, perhaps this check should be relaxed to allow such invalid boot
indicators.  How did you make this partition table?  Are many people
like to have one "broken" in this way?

Thanks,
Andrew