[Techtalk] Removing Grub from MBR

[Bruce McPeek]

Peter,

An assumption is being made that the partition table is always in the
place the MS master boot record expects it to be.

Windows ME came out at the end of a period where boot sector viruses,
disk manager software, and boot access and / or switching utilities were
common. The viruses and boot access utilities would often move the
partition table. The disk manager software would change the drive
geometry reported by the BIOS. Booting with the BIOS supplied geometry
would result in looking in the wrong place for the partition.

So, while true that fdisk /mbr does not touch the partition, it can
still render the system just as unusable because the partition is not
where it is expected to be.

Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Samuelson [mailto:peter at p12n.org] 
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 1:49 PM
To: Mike
Cc: techtalk at linuxchix.org
Subject: Re: [Techtalk] Removing Grub from MBR


[Mike]
> fdisk /mbr will take care of it but you will probably have to
> reinstall ME again, as it will be a fresh mbr and wont know where to
> boot.

Not true.  fdisk /mbr doesn't touch the partition table, just the
*rest* of the MBR.  The partition table includes an "active" flag on
one partition, and the MS-DOS MBR uses this flag to decide which
partition to boot.  I suppose it's conceivable, but doubtful, that
Windows ME would forget to set its own active flag.