if you ran the command by hand, you'd get an error message, right? it's not going to fail silently. possiblities you didn't mention is that the drive handed to hasmbr is wrong or the script has a subtile flaw. i would think the only way for that script to siliently fail is that the bytes read are not actually the ones expected.
for example, i don't have an F1 partition: ; sys/lib/dist/pc/inst/hasmbr /dev/sdF1/data xd: can't open /dev/sdF1/data - erik
