On Tue 22 Dec 2015 at 23:05:54 +0100, Nicolas George wrote: > Le duodi 2 nivôse, an CCXXIV, Sven Hartge a écrit : > > In ye olde days (pre-Windowsm 98) some programs (I think Photoshop did > > it.) wrote licence data into that space, because it was unused. The copy > > protection scheme of some games also tried to hide information there. > > > > So "nobody" is not quite right. "nobody with the right mind" would be a > > better description. > > I did not know that, it is simply disgusting. Well, if you have to deal with > bad-behaved proprietary programs that fancy themselves more powerful than > the operating system, then you can not use that feature of GRUB. That means > you have to put its second stage in a partition; obviously, this is possible > too.
Doesn't Reed-Solomon error correction on the core image take care of this issue? Bug #550702, Message #70: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=550702 This is yet another modification on crappy windows applications like Flexible Lies Manager. This is neither Debian nor GRUB bug, but of the windows application which improperly writes to MBR gap. However this is a relatively widespread issue, so in upstream we now write that part using Reed-Solomon so we're not affected by this misbehaviour other than the time needed to recover from corruption in Reed-Solomon.
