I answered my own question

Under device in Gparted, is the option to select a new MBR, which may be DOS 
mve format or other.

I used gparted to initialize a disk that had to be ext2, but needed blksize of 
1024 bytes.
I let it do the init, and subsequently used mkfs to redo the blksize.

Gparted is fantastic for working through the USB port or via the plugin and the 
sata drive.


------------------

Regards  
 Leslie
 Mr. Leslie Satenstein
50 years in IT and going strong.
Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day,
and tomorrow will be even better.
 
mailto:[email protected]
alternative: [email protected] 
www.itbms.biz  
 

--- On Mon, 9/19/11, Leslie S Satenstein <[email protected]> wrote:

From: Leslie S Satenstein <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MLUG] can someone tell me how to put a mbr record on a new disk
To: "Montreal Linux Users Group" <[email protected]>
Date: Monday, September 19, 2011, 5:50 PM

Andy, Jerome, Jeremy and everyone who responded.
I will try the file - <  file - < /dev/sdc  
and then  will try  dd  if=/dev/sdc of=/tmp/mbr.txt bs=4096

------------------

Regards  
 Leslie
 Mr. Leslie Satenstein
50 years in IT and going strong.
Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day,
and tomorrow will be even better.
 
mailto:[email protected]
alternative: [email protected] 
www.itbms.biz  
 
From: Andy Pintar
 <[email protected]>
To: Montreal Linux Users Group <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2011 2:53 PM
Subject: Re: [MLUG] can someone tell me how to put a mbr record on a new disk

On Mon, 19 Sep 2011, Jérôme Oufella wrote:

> ----- Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
>> If you know a quick way to produce an empty or non empty mbr, please
>> let me know. Perhaps grub-install would do that, but how can I verify
>> that it did it?
>
> Also, you can check your disk's mbr contents with something like that.
>
> # file - < /dev/sda
> /dev/stdin: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3, 
> boot drive 0x80, 1st sector stage2 0x84a6a; partition 1: ID=0x83, active, 
> starthead 32, startsector 2048,
 1024000 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x8e, starthead 221, startsector 1026048, 
975747072 sectors, code offset 0x63
>
> Jerome

Neat trick.  I've been a fan of CLEARING my hdds with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=<physical disk> bs=1024 (or whatever) count=blah
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