> It looks like mke2fs does indeed zap the fat boot sector, so grub
correctly identifies it as ext2, at least as far back as lucid. Since
this was originally reported in 2009, maybe older versions didn't do
this? Seems we can mark this one as fixed.
seems to imply that e2fsprogs is fix released a
this bug was not reproducible in 2011 and could not be reproduced as far
back as Lucid. Might as well close this since there has been no
activity since then.
** Changed in: e2fsprogs (Ubuntu)
Status: New => Invalid
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It looks like mke2fs does indeed zap the fat boot sector, so grub
correctly identifies it as ext2, at least as far back as lucid. Since
this was originally reported in 2009, maybe older versions didn't do
this? Seems we can mark this one as fixed.
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You received this bug notification because y
Ok, so I've taken a closer look at this.
mke2fs *does* zap the first 1k of the file system (by writing all
zeros). The only system where it doesn't do this is sparc, because
apparently that seriously screws up the bootloader. I don't remember
the details, only that the sparc folks were screaming
If you are going to format the whole disk, then you don't want any
partition table that may already be there do you?. As for the boot
code, well, you have to reinstall LILO after you format and put a new
kernel on the disk anyhow. If it is a grub MBR, well, you trashed grub
anyhow when you write
The reason why mke2fs doesn't zap sector 0 is because if someone is
installing Linux on the whole disk (i.e., on /dev/sda instead of
/dev/sda1), that sector is also the partition label and boot sector.
And there isn't a good/portable way to determine whether a device is the
whole disk or partition.
