Bug#345931: A patch closing #345931, verified against debian testing

[Mats Erik Andersson]

   Dear Maintainers and others,

 the attached patch-file closes to my understanding 
 the urgent bug 345931. I write this very message in
 respons to a question of Robert Millan last Monday.
 The patch
           boot_drive_correction.diff
 
 is simply a beautyfied version of the one submitted
 the first time.

 Yesterday I fetched from Debian Sid grub 0.97-16.1,
 built it and observed that, as expected according
 to #345931, it destroyed and made useless the MBR
 of my grub 0.95+cvs20040624-17sarge1. But by an
 application of my patch the altered version of 
 of grub 0.97 (the patch does not touch any code
 alterations of debian) correctly is able to
reactivate
 the the bootloader installed by grub 0.95.

 Let me stress that the patch simply make shore that
 the relevant technique used for boot-drive-workaround
 of grub 0.94-0.97 is respected by grub 0.97. The
 revision 0.97 originally disregards this backwards
 compatibility. At the end of the patch, there is
 an indication of how compatability may be extended
 to versions 0.92-0.93, should the maintainers so
 desire.

 Lastly, Robert Millan asks for relevance visavi
 Grub2. A quick check reveals that grub 1.94 does
 indeed utilize exactly the same workaround for
 harddisk booting as grub 0.97 does. The position
 at which this workaround is checked and applied is

    grub-1.94/util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c  line  250.

 That position is the place to apply a patch with
 code accomodations to the new settings.

 HOWEVER, it is not clear to me if the Maintainers
 desire compatibility of Grub2 backwards to Grub
Legacy
 in the sense that the former should be able to 
 reactivate a bootloader installed by the latter.
 The maintainers need to decide on this on their own.
 I have not delved into the complete code of Grub2.

      Regards
                    Mats Erik Andersson
                    ynglingatal at yahoo.se

 
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