On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 09:58:42AM +0100, Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote: > I think this bug can be fixed, at least on the standard version of mbr (not > on the Y2K version, but machines needing that won't run Windows7 or later > anyway). The problem is that the changes needed point to an upstream > change, that's why I tried to contact Neil, the upstream author, but failing > to do so I tried to do it through Santiago Vila, the previous maintainer, > but he also seems to have failed.
It certainly can be fixed. I am pretty sure I could fix it, but it does come at the expense of breaking the existing install-mbr interface to the mbr data. I too would like to know if there is an upstream and if so what they think of it. > That's what I saw and thus I said, this is something to be done by upstream. If they are still around. I think for the quik boot loader (old powerpc loader), Debian essentially is the upstream, although the last code change appears to be when I patched it to work with newer ext filesystems that needed more space 4 years ago. > Well, we haven't been able to contact him at his chiark address and don't > know of any other way to contact him. > > I agree on this as the least we can do to fix this, but I'd rather have an > upstream new binary version of the mbr, as doing it at Debian doesn't seem > the right thing to do. If finaly agree that we don't have an upstream for > mbr we may then do the changes by ourselves, but I'd like to try to contact > him one more time (I'll do this right now). Feel free to try to contact > him, I suspect that antispam may be dropping the mails, so maybe you are > more lucky. > > If you have it clear, please send patches for this or suggest the new > locations, ... I have not yet attempted to fix it, but I could do that and submit a suggestion patch. > Here goes one of my last mails to Neil dated 11th July: > > Hi! > > I have tried to contact you from my Debian account, then from my own > domain and now from gmail, as I saw your servers have very strict > email policies, let's see if this time the mail reaches you :-) > > I have received a bug on Debian (https://bugs.debian.org/725417) that > explains that new MS Windows need what is called a Disk signature on > the mbr, and if we use install-mbr to write our mbr this signature > gets changed, and then windows stops booting. > > The bugreport talks about 4 bytes, but it is really 6 bytes that need > to be moved away, 6 just before the partition table data. > > I started looking at this with the idea of patching this on the non > Y2K version, as this one was already too tight, however even the > normal version seems to be too tight, we had only 5 bytes of padding > space on this version. > > On the other hand, on the 6 bytes that are being used for the Disk > signature you had placed the pointer to the data area, so the pointer > should be relocated, this is... unless we don't care about those two > bytes right where we have the pointer, as the signature is right on > the four previous ones and then at 1BC our pointer. This seems to work > ok at least with Windows 7. > > The place were we have our signature should be a 0000h word or 5A5Ah > if it is copy protected, at least acording to wikipedia, but Win7 > seems to work anyway. > > Well, what do you think about all this? Seems reasonable to me. I see in some searches that some places have contacted at +mbr@chiark, while the web page there suggests neilt+www@chiark... It is entirely possible that the chiark page has been forgotten and the email no longer works of course. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
