Hi Okuji-san If stage 1 was my software, I would at least correct the disk transfer buffer setting in the floppy probing. The current code places this buffer (register ES most probably set to 0xF000 by INT 0x13, function 8) at 0xF000:0x7000, which is somewhere amidst the BIOS ROM area. So, if the floppy probing was executed (it hardly ever is, as I have stated in earlier postings), a 512 byte chunk of BIOS code is replaced with rubbish. Well, writing into ROM perhaps is simply ignored, but think of Shadow RAM, where a write might succeed. The effects of such overwriting might well be detected much later only, when the OS is fired up, resulting in strange behaviour then, and a user wouldn’t blame GRUB for this in the first place. I personally would not like to have such a piece of code in my software, even if it was executed under rare conditions only (fancy somebody [could be me]: " I'd like to have GRUB boot from my fancy 1.68 MB formatted disk, but, hell, GRUB doesn’t support this format. Let's see whether I can patch it. Aah..., there's a floppy probing code, and there are the probing values. Easy. Simply include a value according to my floppy geometry and bypass the program logic by placing an immediate jump to the probing code at a proper location. Will work fine!" Indeed, will work fine for GRUB, but some time later: BOOOM).
One might think about securing the chain stage 1/stage 2, because people are still bitten by the loose connection (See a recent posting of Paul Galbraith on this mailing list). Checking a magic value [a bit Monte Carlo, but with high reliability] first before starting stage 2, could give an appropriate hint to the user. So far my suggestions for the current stage 1, apart from cleaning up. The over-all program logic, as far as I can see, is, of course, sufficient enough to work for 99.99% (or more) of all GRUB users using nowadays hardware. Wolf Lammen -- +++ NEU bei GMX und erstmalig in Deutschland: TÜV-geprüfter Virenschutz +++ 100% Virenerkennung nach Wildlist. Infos: http://www.gmx.net/virenschutz _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub