Re: [PATCH] Fix when installing on pationless but partionable medium

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 11:02:05AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 09:22:11PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 09:00:36PM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko 
> > wrote:
> > > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Robert Millan<address@hidden> wrote:
> > > > I'm not sure there's much we can do about this.  Using heuristics 
> > > > sounds like
> > > > it will make the solution worse than the problem.  I don't care much 
> > > > about
> > > > Microsoft filesystems, but I'd hate to see GRUB fail on a completely 
> > > > sane
> > > > ext3 inside msdos label because it happened to look like FAT in raw 
> > > > disk at
> > > > the same time.
> > > 
> > > The approach proposed by Collin avoids such problems since correct
> > > pc_partition_map is always detected as such.
> > 
> > I haven't looked at the source code, but what he said is we can determine if
> > an MBR is valid by checking the bootable flag, and this is not always so.
> 
> If the bootable flag is neither 0 nor 0x80, then neither libparted nor
> the Linux kernel will understand it as a DOS partition table. Is it
> really all that helpful for GRUB to attempt to do so?

No.  Sorry, I miss-read what you said before.  See my other mail.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."