On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 02:23:01PM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:
Hi Petr,
Hi Alex,
When running parted to create or modify an MBR label, it tries to be clever and throws a dummy x86 boot sector onto the MBR, so the disk is bootable on PCs.
While that's nice and helpful for a bunch of use cases, it doesn't exactly help when running on ARM. Some ARM devices, such as the OMAP3 series, have a buggy boot rom that simply goes into nirvana if it finds non-0 in the first 4 bytes of the SD card.
Please see libparted/labels/dos.c:1271 for the place that copies a generic x86 asm MBR into the MBR when its first byte is 0.
We need to have the first byte be 0 though. Otherwise later on the whole machine won't be bootable anymore :). Any idea how to resolve this? The easy fix I could imagine would be to just not do the fixup on ARM, but that sounds slightly hackish :(.
It can easily hide in the pile of other hacks in parted ;) I created https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=769789 and submitted a fix to Factory (and 12.2).
Alex
Thanks, Petr -- Petr Uzel IRC: ptr_uzl @ freenode