William Case wrote:
Hi Jacques et al;
If I have just installed a new drive on a new machine, how do I
configure the drive (before partitioning) so that it has a MBR. Suppose
I am offering customers an option of Operating Systems that will be
installed after they make their choice of systems. At that time I will
install the appropriate partitions and file systems.
Can I put a MBR on a drive without formatting the rest?
The first sector is the MBR. Whatever is there is what the system will
try to use: sensible BIOSes will reject it if the MBR is invalid (for
some value of all terms).
To ensure it's invalid, this will do it to /dev/sda:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1
I'm not sure it's a very useful thing to do though.
Note, Jacques, that /dev/null doesn't do anything useful here:-)
fdisk, when partitioning, will write an MBR with no boot code.
grub and lilo (re)write the boot code when installed. Windows XP also
has the ability to write its boot code after partitioning, and if
suitably desperate I'd find out how again:-)
--
Cheers
John
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