[Bug 995144] Re: Grub2 Corrupts Hard Drive and Bad Design Causing failed boot.

[David F.]

In the PC architecture (has nothing to do with DOS) the boot partition
is the active partition.  When Linux OS is installed, that partition is
where the kernel loader should be located and that partition set active
if the user choose (for extended partitions I offered a solution in my
prior message).

Sectors in the first track has been reserved by IBM for data structures
since the early 90's and the entire first track has been fully
standardized and extended by the EMBR in 1996. See
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/specs/embr2.pdf and
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/history-bootit-bare-metal.htm.  The
first track has further been defined for EFI based systems and the GPT.

You should also note that the alignment to 2048 sectors has caused many
users lost data and corruption by older OSes and their tools, this is,
once again, because of the lack of knowledge and experience of those
implementing it.

The fact remains that the current design of GRUB on PC's is destructive
and improper.   The design and flexibility of the PC architecture would
allow a properly designed GRUB to work without causing any problems of
conflicts.



** Changed in: grub2 (Ubuntu)
       Status: Invalid => Confirmed

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/995144

Title:
  Grub2 Corrupts Hard Drive and Bad Design Causing failed boot.

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  It's bad enough that the designers of various linux distros decided
  the default place for GRUB was the MBR instead of adhering to standard
  PC architecture practices (which all other OSes, including *nix
  version, followed), of putting the kernel loaders in the partition and
  making it active so standard code in the MBR would transfer control to
  it.  For cases where a volume was to boot it could have made the
  Extended partition active, put the start code in the EBR of the
  extended and have that boot the volume.    The Linux community would
  have a fit if MS decided it was going to write its own kernel loaders
  and stick them in the MBR and take over the disk.

  Anyway, now apparently whoever has taken over GRUB2 (latest version)
  has made some big mistakes and must not understand the standard pc
  architecture either.  Someone has made it write outside the first
  track of the hard drive if it doesn't think there is a partition
  there.

  1 - Writing outside the first track of the hard drive can corrupt
  partitions not in the MBR at the time which is common with various
  partitioning schemes and cause data loss for users.

  2 - Adding a partition to the start of the disk (cylinder aligned)
  afterwards would overwrite the part of GRUB written out beyond the
  first track making the entire system unbootable.

  3 - changing partition layouts can again overwrite GRUB data which
  should be in the partition by default.

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