Re: Protection of boot sector and embedded area

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>]

James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 2009/9/26 Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>:
>   
>> It's generally a bad idea to chase grub out of MBR+embed area. It often
>> results in unreliable configurations. Could you detail your usecase so
>> we can seek for a bettere solution?
>>     
>
> The other thing sitting in the embedded area is a whole disc encryption product.
> It takes up about 60 sectors of the 64 sectors of the embedded area.
>   
I guess you speak about truecrypt. In this case the solution I would
recommend is to make grub load truecrypt's embedding area from a file on
the disk (it probably can be extracted from truecrypt w/o installing
booter). It's not a difficult task, just nobody did it yet (volunteers
are welcome).
Beware that truecrypt is distributed under a license which has legal
danger to the end user.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#TrueCrypt
Of course it's your choice to use it or not but I would suggest to avoid
such software especially for the data you need to protect
> I don't think that there is a standard way of managing who has
> priority over the embedded area.
> I think it would be good if one could put grub into the beginning of a
> partition.
> The problem with this is that I don't know if there is room to put
> grub at the beginning of an ext3
>  or lvm partition. If it were possible, it would make grub much more
> compatible with Dual boot systems.
>
>
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