On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 12:36:31PM -0000, Ronan Mooney wrote: > There's no reliable way to tell whether GRUB is installed in an MBR or > not- > This seems unlikely. I am sure a "best Guess" could be made, at which > point a confirmation question could be asked.
Unlikely or not, it's my assessment that it's true. Matching binary code would be very fragile, would have to detect all old versions of GRUB, would be liable to break any time GRUB is changed, and there's no way I can think of to tell which of the many other MBR implementations would share some of that code. Matching text strings suffers from the problem that the GRUB-specific text strings in the MBR are relatively close to the end of the MBR, and it's entirely possible that an MBR implementation that didn't use the whole available space wouldn't overwrite them. Thus I believe any such check would be unreliable in both directions. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/495423 Title: update to grub-pc writes MBR without checks, prompt or backup -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
