On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 12:00:22PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote: > On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 10:05 -0500, Matt Domsch wrote: > > fdisk and parted presently always write zeros to the 4-byte signature > > field at offset 0x1b8 in the MBR. Dell's factory install tools will > > write a unique signature to each BIOS-visible disk, so we're good > > there. Anaconda will need similar code. > > Well, for anaconda to do it the best thing is actually to get parted > doing so. Problem is, parted only knows about one disk at a time, not about all the disks in a system. You really need a small tool like eddsupport.c could be which open()s' all disks, reads the MBR, verifies it's an MSDOS label, generates new sigs for the non-unique disks, write()s them, and is finished. > I'd rather not have to have a weird hack in anaconda for this > as it requires keeping track of things like what partition table type it > is and only doing it if we're on MS-DOS. Whereas parted already knows > this when it goes to create a new partition table and we'd just need to > update the initial MBR_BOOT_CODE it writes out (I'm guessing that's the > bit that the signature is included in from quickly looking) Parted could write some nonzero value there, with some limite probablity of it being a duplicate (like, based on the current time or something), but that's the best it can do without also reading all the other disks. Thanks, Matt -- Matt Domsch Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com
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