On 916943242 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Greg A. Woods wrote:
>
>The apparent lesson from all this is that fdisk on 1.3.3 does not update
>an existing MBR (sector zero I mean) with new code if there seems to be
>valid code already there.  I've not yet had time to investigate the code
>and see if this is true or not, but it's very reminiscent of similar
>rumours that I seem to remember.  This seems to be confirmed by the
>-current manual page though, and luckily there's a way to force the
>-current fdisk to zap a new MBR down anyway -- I wish I'd known this
>much earlier in my adventure though.

I've also had a couple of times the old boot block type problem.
I can't remember exactly how I managed it, but I installed NetBSD
on a system that a coworker had Linux on, and when it booted it
just started booting the Linux kernel (keeping in mind that the
block numbers for it are stored in the boot block, it doesn't need
a fs to find it...)  The kernel didn't know what to do with the
NetBSD disk, however.

The solution that I found was:
 # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0d bs=64k count=256
The count is probably a lot higher than I need, but it worked.

 == Roland Dowdeswell
 == http://www.imrryr.org/~elric/