James Egan wrote:
> On Sat, 04 Nov 2006 11:43:19 -0500, kurt wismer <kurtw@sympatico.ca>
> wrote:
>
>>> Are you saying windows alters the partition table of its own accord
>>> sometimes, because that is apparently what happened, or do you mean it
>>> sometimes overwrites whatever boot manager is in use with its own?
>> apologies for my my flaky memory on this issue, i had to go and google
>> it again for the specifics...
>>
>> as of win95 a drive id was introduced into the mbr that windows (not
>> fdisk) places there on bootup (see this article by zvi
>> http://groups.google.com/group/alt.c...7377e6dff955c)...
>
>
> According to wiki, there is a 4 byte area available for the disk
> signature before the 64 byte partition table at the end of the mbr.
> It's used in connection with persistent mapping between partitions and
> drive letters. This would explain the warnings he was getting without
> shedding any light on what went wrong. I don't understand zvi's offset
> 220 (hex DC) remarks.

that's the location relative to the start of the sector rather than
relative to the start of the partition table...

and yes, it would explain the warnings without explaining the failure, i
still don't know what was going on with that failure... there doesn't
seem to be enough data yet... other people have said they can boot win98
machines with bartpe disks just fine so there must be some fact missing...

--
"it's not the right time to be sober
now the idiots have taken over
spreading like a social cancer,
is there an answer?"