[Bug 463015] Re: Both fat and ext[234] boot sectors present at once cause confusion

[Theodore Ts'o]

The reason why mke2fs doesn't zap sector 0 is because if someone is
installing Linux on the whole disk (i.e., on /dev/sda instead of
/dev/sda1), that sector is also the partition label and boot sector.
And there isn't a good/portable way to determine whether a device is the
whole disk or partition.  And it would be a pretty horrible abstraction
violation if mke2fs was trying to figure out whether there was something
valuable in sector 0, whether it's a grub boot sector, or grub2 boot
sector, or a EFI boot sector, or a FAT label....

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to e2fsprogs in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/463015

Title:
  Both fat and ext[234] boot sectors present at once cause confusion

Status in “e2fsprogs” package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: grub2

  grub-probe incorrectly identifies my ext3 partition as containing a
  fat file system.  This means it can't boot without manual tweaking.

  I suspect the problem is that my partition contains stale fat
  signatures... this is probably a common problem, as mke2fs often
  doesn't wipe old signatures.

  I attached first 8k of my file system for testing purposes.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/463015/+subscriptions