At 03:29 PM 7/23/2005 +0100, Gerry Hickman wrote:
Biggest mitigating factors are that if your hard drive behaves without
errors, is reasonably standard with expected parameters, and there is no
corruption of the program, the MBR write on startup won't occur.
Ah, so this bug only happens with faulty hard-drives or file-systems?
No, it also happens if there is a something which corrupts FDISK during
runtime -- what that might be we don't know as yet, it could be FDISK
itself or it could be something else. The problem can also happen if FDISK
doesn't understand the BIOS information it receives. I do not know whether
that situation actually occurs in real life systems. Beyond that, I could
come up with other scenarios that might fail, but one could speculate for
hours on any number of potential failure risks when using DOS and I don't
think it would productive to do that.
Basically, FDISK is currently operating with a big hole in the safety net
users generally accept as being present. But as your disks are brand new
without existing data, any overwrite of your disks' MBR with garbage would
be a fairly minor nuisance, easily corrected by other means.
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