Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 24 Sep 2003 21:56:31 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: rfc: test whether a device has a partition table |
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On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > And your random byte checks for power-of-2 make no sense. What are they > based on?
Oh, I found the regular DOS bootsector layout.
The thing is, that's FAT-specific. The BIOS doesn't care, and the old Linux boot-sector stuff never had that, for example. It has the 0xAA55 flag, and that makes it bootable.
I bet the same is true of other bootsectors too, that either didn't know about the FAT version, or just needed the space for better things and knew the BIOS didn't care. And some of them might easily have powers-of-two values in those magic bytes.
Linus
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