Re: boot.img Fix

[Robert Millan]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 01:09:20AM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> Sorry for posting some not very-related ideas in one mail and
> top-posting but I want to go to bed ASAP now. FAT install is
> important. A friend asked me on RMLL to install GRUB on his
> partionless SD card. This card was formatted with Symbian and
> contained no "FAT32" string. I actually see no reason to keep the
> check for this string. Originally it was added to ignore some recovery
> partitions from the list. But there is no reason to do so even if they
> normally contain no useful data. It's user's freedom to read even
> useless data in GRUB.
> Current grub-setup may have a bug to accidently detect FAT* as
> pc_partition_map (they share signature) and try to embed with
> potentially bad results
> For FAT booting I would prefer to have 3 separate sectors able to
> parse FAT32/FAT16/FAT12. I would prefer it to be able to go into
> subdirectories but in worst case grub-install can copy core.img to the
> root. Or we can use so-called "reserved sectors" on FAT to either
> store second part of parser or embed core. For the latter the obstacle
> is that it's typically only around 32 reserved sectors.

I agree GRUB should be very careful not to destroy potentially valuable
data.  However, that's not to say FAT install is important.  Typically
our install doesn't collide or interfere with any filesystem, it's only
a few corner cases that do, and IMO we should try to discourage those.

But of course, destroying someone's filesystem is not the right way to
discourage something :-)

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."