On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 03:05:51PM -0400, Paulo Flabiano Smorigo wrote:
How can I know if a partition is securely a PReP partition? Besides check the partition type (41), is there another test that I can do to confirm that?
At the page bellow are two other codes used for the same code of PReP (41):
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html
41 Linux/MINIX (sharing disk with DRDOS) 41 Personal RISC Boot 41 PPC PReP (Power PC Reference Platform) Boot
What kind of checks can I do? Can I use the partition size or if it's the first of the disk as parameters to check it?
I don't believe there is anything you can do.
The contents can be anything (mine contains the raw grub image for booting).
rceng03:~# file -s /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, PowerPC or cisco 4500, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
Perhaps you can check if it contains executable code, since that is certainly true of how the partition is used by IBM. I imagine that would not be true of the linux/minix one (unless I suppose the bootloader happens to be embedded at the start of the partition in a non raw way. I believe x86 uses raw executeable code in that case, unlike PReP which seems to have ELF binaries instead). No idea about Personal RISC Boot.
rceng03:~# parted /dev/sda print Model: IBM ST3146356SS (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 147GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 8225kB 8193kB primary boot, prep 2 8389kB 1009MB 1000MB primary raid 3 1009MB 141GB 140GB primary raid 4 141GB 147GB 5806MB primary raid
rceng03:~# parted /dev/sdb print Model: IBM ST3146356SS (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 147GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 8225kB 8193kB primary boot, prep 2 8389kB 1009MB 1000MB primary raid 3 1009MB 141GB 140GB primary raid 4 141GB 147GB 5806MB primary raid
Mine happens to be partition one, but I think that is just because if habit on my part.
I think the size of 8MiB in my case is simply the minimum for one cylinder.