On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 02:00:58PM -0700, Donald J Christensen wrote:
IMHO it is a better solution than non-standard partitioning. Actually I think the region past the first sector (512 bytes) is unused, if I am reading http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwtab.htm correctly.
The 62 sectors after the MBR are not officially used, but there are apps and OSes that do make use of that space. For example, the latest version of TurboTax sticks some crap in there somewhere for its DRM mechanism. There was a big stink about it by some users, because it hosed other apps that also use that space.
So if the PC is used for anything other than Linux (I don't know of any Linux OS or app related uses of that space), you might want to be careful.
I think GRUB is using this space to store its "stage1.5" image. It's 6-9KB in size.
-- Takeshi