What is, and why does parted insert ~80 bytes of code to the MBR boot loader region of a disk when that region contains zeros? Example:
[root@localhost liveuser]# dd if=/dev/sda count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C 00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00000200 ## LBA 0 is all zeros. [root@localhost liveuser]# parted /dev/sda mklabel msdos Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab. [root@localhost liveuser]# dd if=/dev/sda count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C 00000000 fa b8 00 10 8e d0 bc 00 b0 b8 00 00 8e d8 8e c0 |................| 00000010 fb be 00 7c bf 00 06 b9 00 02 f3 a4 ea 21 06 00 |...|.........!..| 00000020 00 be be 07 38 04 75 0b 83 c6 10 81 fe fe 07 75 |....8.u........u| 00000030 f3 eb 16 b4 02 b0 01 bb 00 7c b2 80 8a 74 01 8b |.........|...t..| 00000040 4c 02 cd 13 ea 00 7c 00 00 eb fe 00 00 00 00 00 |L.....|.........| 00000050 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 000001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 64 0b 00 00 00 00 00 00 |........d.......| 000001c0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 000001f0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 55 aa |..............U.| 00000200 [root@localhost liveuser]# ## LBA 0 now contains code were there was previously none. The problem with it I'm encountering with a single BIOS so far (Virtual Box) is that this disk is no longer skipped at boot time, the BIOS tries to boot from it and hangs. Chris Murphy
