[syslinux] PXELINUX based kickstart query (probably OT)

[Coe, Colin C. (Unix Engineer)]

Hey all

I tried 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=2 seek=255 count=1' and while a
network boot was forced, all the partition info on /dev/sda was lost.  

I tried 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1' and after POST the
workstation just sits a blank screen when it should have either gone to
a PXE screen or GRUB.  On the bright side, the partition ifo was intact
so fixing it was easy.

So I just need a combination of these to outcomes  :)

Any ideas?

CC


-----Original Message-----
From: H. Peter Anvin [mailto:hpa at zytor.com] 
Sent: Saturday, 14 October 2006 5:24 AM
To: Steve Brown
Cc: Coe, Colin C. (Unix Engineer); SYSLINUX at zytor.com
Subject: Re: [syslinux] PXELINUX based kickstart query (probably OT)


Steve Brown wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Oct 2006, Coe, Colin C. (Unix Engineer) wrote:
> 
>> - based on the info in http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwmbr.htm I tried
>> wiping the first 138 bytes of /dev/sda
> 
> IIRC, you need to whack the first 446 bytes.  dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/sda
> bs=446 count=1
> 

No, what you probably need to do is to remove the signature, that is the

last two bytes in the first 512-byte sector.

	-hpa