Bill Leach wrote: > > Yes I am aware of this but also have experienced in the past that doing > this (fdisk/mbr) has made it possible to partition a disk that would not > otherwise be accepted by fdisk. Because of what you say, I feel as though > it borders on "FM" but possibly it has something to do with the BIOS of > the particular machines where this has workded?
Ah, I'm willing to bet this is because the boot block contains a "magic number" and that fdisk will reject any disk which does not have this magic number (perhaps it had been corrupted). Note this excerpt from /usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt: The MS-DOS boot sector has the following structure: +------------------------+ 0x000 |Jump to the program code| |------------------------| 0x003 | | | Disk parameters | | | |------------------------| 0x02C/0x03E | | | Program code | | | | | |------------------------| 0x1FE | Magic number (0xAA55) | +------------------------+ -- Jens B. Jorgensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .