Re: rfc: test whether a device has a partition table

[Linus Torvalds]

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

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/