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From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
To: Andries Brouwer <aebr@win.tue.nl>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: rfc: test whether a device has a partition table
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 21:56:31 -0700 (PDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0309242153100.1729-100000@home.osdl.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0309242137090.1729-100000@home.osdl.org>


On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> And your random byte checks for power-of-2 make no sense. What are they
> based on?

Oh, I found the regular DOS bootsector layout. 

The thing is, that's FAT-specific. The BIOS doesn't care, and the old 
Linux boot-sector stuff never had that, for example. It has the 0xAA55 
flag, and that makes it bootable.

I bet the same is true of other bootsectors too, that either didn't know 
about the FAT version, or just needed the space for better things and knew 
the BIOS didn't care. And some of them might easily have powers-of-two 
values in those magic bytes.

		Linus


  reply	other threads:[~2003-09-25  4:56 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2003-09-24 20:29 Andries.Brouwer
2003-09-24 21:54 ` Linus Torvalds
2003-09-24 23:50   ` Andries Brouwer
2003-09-25  0:05     ` viro
2003-09-25 12:14       ` Andries Brouwer
2003-09-25  0:18     ` Linus Torvalds
2003-09-25  6:53       ` Xavier Bestel
2003-09-25 10:57       ` Andries Brouwer
2003-09-25  4:47     ` Linus Torvalds
2003-09-25  4:56       ` Linus Torvalds [this message]
2003-09-25 11:42       ` Andries Brouwer
2003-10-05  9:00   ` Meelis Roos
2003-09-25  0:42 ` Douglas Gilbert
2003-09-25  1:00   ` viro
2003-09-25  1:27     ` Douglas Gilbert
2004-05-22 11:18 Uwe Bonnes
2004-05-22 12:37 ` John Bradford
2004-05-22 12:56 ` Andries Brouwer
2004-05-22 15:14   ` Uwe Bonnes

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