[syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6

[Michael_E_Brown at Dell.com]

Even then, not good.

I am the principle architect for Dell Server Assitant 8.0. It is an
installer that Dell ships with every server we sell. The new version is
based on Linux and uses isolinux.

We must always ask permission from the user before we change a block on the
disk. Asking for this permission from the boot loader would not be an
acceptable user interface (our marketing people would freak out).

--
Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: H. Peter Anvin [mailto:hpa at zytor.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 12:29 PM
To: Brown, Michael E
Cc: patl at users.sourceforge.net; syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: Re: [syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6


Michael_E_Brown at Dell.com wrote:
> Hmm...
> 
> Writing to the disk from your bootloader.
> 
> I can think of all kinds of situations where we completely screw the 
> system doing this. You would have to have some kind of very rigorously 
> controlled environment to have a hope of not messing things up.
>

This is not for a general boot loader, remember.  This is for an
*installer*, which will wipe disks anyway.

	-hpa