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  • Olaf Hering's avatar
    [PATCH] relax check for AIX in msdos partition table · 4419d1ac
    Olaf Hering authored
    The patch to identify AIX disks and ignore them has caused at least one
    machine to fail to find the root partition on 2.6.19. The patch is:
    
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/31/117
    
    
    
    The problem is some disk formatters do not blow away the first 4 bytes
    of the disk. If the disk we are installing to used to have AIX on it,
    then the first 4 bytes will still have IBMA in EBCDIC.
    
    The install in question was debian etch. Im not sure what the best fix
    is, perhaps the AIX detection code could check more than the first 4
    bytes.
    
    The whole partition info for primary partitions is in this block:
    
      dd if=/dev/sdb count=$(( 4 * 16 )) bs=1 skip=$(( 0x1be ))
    
    All other data do not matter, beside the 0x55aa marker at the end of the
    first block.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarOlaf Hering <olh@suse.de>
    Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
    Cc: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    4419d1ac