[Etherboot-users] Re: Linuxbios + Etherboot + tagged Kernel Image

[Donald J Christensen]

Steve Gehlbach wrote:

(Hey, Steve!  How's it going?)

> ron minnich wrote:
> 
> > my mistake. What I have done is this for now:
> > dd if=elfImage of=/dev/hda bs=4096 skip=1
> >
> > preserves partition information. A kludge, but it works.
> >
> 
> 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.

> One should also point out that this overlaps into partition 1, if that
> is not obvious, so partition 1 should be large enough and unused.
> 
> -Steve

Alternatively, could partition 1 start farther along on the disk,
leaving enough space for the kernel at the front of the disk?  This
would eliminate the possible confusion of having a partition that
is off limits.  (I haven't used the newer Etherboot, so I am not
very familiar with this boot-from-disk capability.)

-Don

-- 
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
djc at cisco.com         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
  "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."