On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 04:06:45PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com> writes:
> > I just saw http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0%2c3973%2c881243%2c00.asp
> > which warns that TurboTax is apparently writing licensing info to 
> > Sector 33.  The article warns that some multi-boot utilities may use 
> > that space -- does NetBSD's?
> 
> NetBSD's doesn't. Its a bit of a miracle, actually -- Frank actually
> fit everything for multiboot into the MBR itself. Astonishingly small
> code.

Quite small - plenty of scope for improvement :-)
Fitting the code into 406 bytes is the reason why the user interface
is so terse.

> However, I'll point out that writing random stuff into a random sector
> is probably quite unfriendly overall -- I'm not sure that every
> machine will have sector 33 cleanly available for such purposes, and
> certainly it isn't safe to assume it is.

IIRC track zero is reserverd for the bios - although I'm not sure
what for :-)  Certainly anti-virus software has a tendency to use
parts of it.


	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk