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New HDD, planning to install both Linux & Windows Vista (Read 22246 times)

Brian

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NSW, Australia

Re: New HDD, planning to install both Linux & Windows Vista
Reply #30 - Aug 4^th, 2007 at 6:19am

NightOwl,

A piece of light reading.

Quote:

Extended Master Boot Record
The Extended Master Boot Record (EMBR) is defined as the area of a hard disk from physical cylinder 0, head 0,
sector 2, to (and including) the last physical sector of cylinder 0, head 0. The actual area available to the EMBR
depends upon the BIOS mapping of the logical CHS and reserved sectors. The minimum availability requirements
for the EMBR is sectors 3 through 17.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Chv2oBysmCgJ:www.bootitng.com/specs/embr2.pd...

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NightOwl

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Re: New HDD, planning to install both Linux & Windows Vista
Reply #31 - Aug 4^th, 2007 at 8:50am

Brian

Quote:

A piece of light reading.

Indeed!

Thank you for your link--almost looks like the EMBR may be a TeraByte Unlimited specification specific to their specialized software--kinda hard to tell!

But, that area on the HDD is where special code is placed when you have special boot software such as RAID Array support, or the older *Over-drive* software used on some older systems that did not have BIOS support for larger HDD's.

Also, some password and encryption software place their code here--as well as some anti-piracy code (activation code) that prevents using programs on other systems.

I wonder how these various programs use this area without conflict, and over-writing other software code--hopefully they are designed to be aware of other code in this area.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

No question is stupid ... but, possibly the answers are Wink

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Brian

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NSW, Australia

Re: New HDD, planning to install both Linux & Windows Vista
Reply #32 - Aug 4^th, 2007 at 3:25pm

NightOwl,

On a practical basis, TeraByte has a tool to protect the EMBR. EMBRLock. I don't know how this affects programs which later try to use these sectors. Perhaps it just protects its own sectors.

Quote:

This utility will protect the EMBR area on hard drives in the system against the few ill behaved Windows programs which unnecessarily modify physical sectors on the hard drive -- most using C_DILLA. A list of known programs is contained in the readme.txt file included with EMBRLock. If you don't have a problem then there is no need to use this utility.

Quote:

EMBRLock protects individual sectors within the EMBR yet allows
existing programs to continue to work.

Quote:

Here is a list of known programs which may try to write
sectors within the EMBR:

* Mechwarrior 4 Mech Pak (several).
* TurboTax.
* Novell's Zen For Desktops 4 imaging component.

* In general programs using the C_DILLA (SafeDisk/SafeCast) copy protection.
There are quite a few games which use it.

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