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

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 09:17:41PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 09:01:38PM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 8:45 PM, Robert Millan<address@hidden> wrote:
> > > I might be missing something about this check, but GRUB doesn't require 
> > > that
> > > the boot flag is present.  Therefore, its non presence doesn't imply this 
> > > is
> > > not a real msdos label.
> > 
> > He refers to boot flag as a byte in msdos structure which can only be
> > 0x00 (not set) or 0x80 (set)
> 
> Yes.  GRUB's boot.img doesn't do anything with it AFAICT.

That's as may be, sure; but checking that that byte is one of the two
permitted values in all four partitions happens to be a good sanity
check for whether it's really an MS-DOS label or in fact something else.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden