Eric Auer schreef:
It ends with 55 aa, and even then, you know nothing about whether it contains a WORKING boot program. The MBR contains TWO things: The boot program and the partition data. FDISK had the VERY stupid function to delete BOTH and replace them with a fresh copy if the 55 aa was missing or if there was a disk read error. The latter reproduceably killed several PCs.
replace on disk error is dangerous, replace-on-missing AA55 is something FDISK can ask the user in interactive mode, or batchfile can do FDISK /MBR.
What does the MBR of an empty harddisk look like? any dump program for saving it to floppy?
Whatever. Just use FDISK /MBR *only* in a manual way. Tell the user that he can use it if he installed DOS on a machine which NEVER booted any other OS before, and he experiences that just nothing happens at boot time, no message and stuff.
how to act on fresh *empty* disks? it should result in an MBR created as it's necessary for booting the computer.
Eric
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