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On 10/23/2014 11:47 AM, Ankur Sinha wrote: > Hello, > > I've recently gotten a new workstation at university. It came with > Windows 7 and of course, I added Fedora 21 to the mix. However, each > time I log into Windows and reboot, it seems to get stuck in a kind of > boot loop at BIOS - probably can't find grub. Would anyone know what > causes this? Seems to be some Windows boot repair? > > It's quite simple to fix - boot into rescue mode from a netinstall or > dvd media and reinstall grub. However, when I do this, grub gives me a > message on the lines of: > >> Installing for i386-pc platform. >> grub2-install: warning: Sector 5 is already in use by the program ‘ZISD’; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track. >> > > I've looked around and ZISD seems to be some Novell program - I'm really > not sure what it is. Can I remove it? Is there a simple way to? Will my > system always loose grub after booting to Windows?? > > -- > Thanks, > Warm regards, > Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD" > > As you probably discovered, it's "Zenworks Imaging Safe Data". Among other things, Zenworks is used for PXE deployment, and this data provides some workstation-specific variables for imaging. We use Zenworks at my $DAYJOB, although not in such detail; the idea is a whole package solution for imaging, software deployment, configuration, user management, etc to effectively make workstations disposable. Think cobbler+puppet with a nice web GUI and... unpredictable results - only some unique data is stored in the mbr padding instead of /in addition to the server. Ask me sometime if you're curious, I won't rant here :) So, if you overwrite this, the university IT staff would loose the ability to reimage your machine on demand. If you had garbaged up your Windows installation, they could theoretically just plug it into an imaging switch and the tools would Do The Right Thing when setting up your machineIDs and such. Reimaging without the Imaging Safe Data would be just like if your HDD had crashed and the data was unavailable; they'd have to do minutes more work to redeploy the specced image to your machine. To make things more fun, these values can be changed by the Admin at any time, enabled by the Zenworks Agent running in Windows, which is why you've had to reinstall grub repeatedly. Just like puppet - configurations are *enforced*, not just defined. I'd suggest creating a partition whose filesystem has extra padding for the grub binary, or installing GRUB directly to a BIOSBOOT type dummy partition. In theory, ZCM should only be touching sectors 34-63 these days, but I wouldn't want to fight that battle with the university's IT administration :P -- -- Pete Travis - Fedora Docs Project Leader - 'randomuser' on freenode - immanetize@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
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