#4 confuses GNU parted (and hence debian-installer)

[Donovan Baarda]

SBM has an MBR signature that looks like an old style
whole-disk FAT16 partition. This confuses GNU parted,
which sees only a single partition, instead of whatever is
in the partition table.

GNU parted is becoming the partition manager of choice
for many Linux distributions. On systems with SBM
installed in the MBR, these distributions cannot correctly
detect and configure partitions.

It seems GNU parted is one of the only partition
managers that checks the MBR for this signature. Nearly
every other partition manger ignores the MBR and reads
the partition table directly (which is why cfdisk, fdisk,
fdisk.exe etc don't hit this problem).

[Bernhard Treutwein]

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Hi Donavan,

apparently SBM is orphaned. Since it has some distinguished
features (e.g. chainloading an El-Torito bootable CD), I played
around and found a solution, where you do not have to put
SBM in the MBR, it is sufficient to have it in a file. I have
written up some tiny info and have put it here:
http://www.lrz.de/~bernhard/grub-chain-cd.html

regards
Bernhard

[Donovan Baarda]

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I assume by "orphaned" you mean the Debian package is
orphaned, not that the whole SBM project has been
abandoned... I hope not :-)

I can fix and submit a patch, but it will need some time and
testing, neither of which I have time for. If nothing
happens in a month I will tackle it then.

[Bernhard Treutwein]

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Hmm,

there is no activity in the project since 3 years 5 months,
which suggests that something is going wrong ...

regards
Bernhard

[Donovan Baarda]

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For the record, at least recent versions of the Debian
parted have been "fixed" so that they are no-longer confused
by SBM.

Provided the Debian fixes to parted manage to make it
upstream, I would be tempted to mark this bug closed.