John R Pierce wrote:
> the rest of the space between the sector 0 MBR and the first primary
> partition is completely empty, nothing puts anything there.
You say that with supreme self-confidence,
but I have just looked at 3 disks with eg
[tim@helen tmp]$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=sdb.mbr bs=2048 count=1
and in each case there is material after the MBR,
eg "od -c" shows two have the following at the same place
0001360 376 L o a d i n g s t a g e 1 .
0001400 5 \0 . \0 \r \n \0 G e o m \0 R e a d
0001420 \0 E r r o r \0 273 001 \0 264 016 315 020 F
while the third has
0001420 \0 353 376 l o a d i n g \0 . \0 \r \n \0
0001440 G e o m \0 R e a d \0 E r r o r
I don't know if this is relevant, but the first two
were on machines running CentOS and grub,
while the third was on a machine running Fedora and grub2 .
I notice that the file command, surprisingly, seems to analyze the MBRs,
thus answering my original query,
though with slightly different outputs from grub and grub2 machines.
Eg
[tim@helen tmp]$ file sdb.mbr
sdb.mbr: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3,
stage2 address 0x2000, stage2 segment 0x200, GRUB version 0.94;
partition 1: ID ...
[tim@rose ~]$ file sda.mbr
sda.mbr: ; partition 1: ID=0x7, active, starthead 1, startsector 63,
167774145 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x83, starthead 254,
startsector 167774208, 8388608 sectors;
...
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
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