[Parted-maintainers] Bug#293307: parted does not recognize MS-DOS partition table on iPod

[K.G.]

Hi,

I just took a look to the ipod_boot_sector you sent and the only
thing I'm sure about is that Apple completely messed up the format...

This is a mix of an MBR and a DBR describing a FAT32... I've never
seen something so crazy before. That's quite like mixing a
container and its content. Parted rejects it because it checks
for "FAT" at well known places of the sector to check if the sector
is not indeed a DBR instead of an MBR, because another brillant guy
from MS choose to use the same signature for both, and this check
can't be removed because this would be dangerous for some USB keys
with no partition table.

Even the MBR part and the DBR part of the mix are full of mistakes :
wrong endianess in a short indicates that sectors are 2 bytes length
instead of 512, and the iPod system partition has ID 0 which should
only be used for free entries!

I won't fix anything to make Parted works with Dos formated iPod
unless Apple put some specs somewhere, because what they did is
clearly not an msdos disklabel anymore even if it still works on
some lazy systems. As there doesn't seem to be any place to ask
these kind of questions to Apple, this is quite unlikely to
happen.

Cheers,
Guillaume Knispel