Re: Test Proposal for [bug #46716] Protective MBR partition is not marked as bootable

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Happy New Year.

I have uploaded 

  http://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso/xorriso-1.4.3.tar.gz

  MD5 3c438044dc8827f2d12b10c64bbf0dd9
  Version timestamp :  2016.01.01.172817

with a new -as mkisofs option to enforce an MBR partition with
"bootable/active" flag set.

 --mbr-force-bootable
     Enforce  an MBR partition with "bootable/active" flag if options
     like --protective-msdos-label or --grub2-mbr are  given.   These
     options  normally  cause  the  flag to be set if there is an MBR
     partition of type other than 0xee or 0xef.  If no such partition
     exists,  then  no  bootflag  is set, unless --mbr-force-bootable
     forces creation of a dummy partition of type 0x00  which  covers
     only the first block of the ISO image.

To be used with grub-mkrescue like this:

  grub-mkrescue -o output.iso minimal --mbr-force-bootable

If your copy of grub-mkrescue complains 

  grub-mkrescue: unrecognized option '--mbr-force-bootable'

then you have the intermediate version which demands '--' as
separator between its own options and those of xorriso -as mkisofs.
In this case use

  grub-mkrescue -o output.iso minimal -- --mbr-force-bootable

---------------------------------------------------------------

The tarball also contains an improved wrapper script

  xorriso-1.4.3/frontend/grub-mkrescue-sed.sh

It offers the following xorriso argument manipulation modes
  "mjg"         =  ESP in MBR+GPT+APM, with HFS+
  "mbr_only"    =  ESP in MBR, without HFS+
  "mbr_hfs"     =  ESP in MBR, HFS+ in APM
  $mode"_copy"  =  one of above modes, ESP in ISO and as appended partition
  "original"    =  pass arguments unchanged

See first 100 lines of the script for detail info.

Mode "mjg" still needs CPPFLAGS="-DLibisofs_mjg_boot_for_grub2".
It would be very interesting to know whether there are machines
which boot by "mjg" but not by "mbr_only" or "original".

---------------------------------------------------------------


Have a nice day :)

Thomas