On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 23:01 +0800, John Summerfield wrote: > John R Pierce wrote: > > John Summerfield wrote: > >> Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha wrote: > >>> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 10:48:36AM -0700, Mark Hull-Richter wrote: > >>>> Are there any tools for working with and moving or copying the MBR? <snip> > except when the drive's not partitioned. New drives are not, and I don't > know a reason you must: I'm sure this will work fine: > > mke2fs /dev/hda > <snip> It does. I've been using unpartitioned HD's for *years* as desired. Further... (YMMV for this?) you can install and use unpartitioned disks in older HW that has a BIOS that won't "see" a disk too large for its BIOS. It won't boot, but Linux will find it and you can use it. And partition it if you want. As to the OP's original Q, the (B?)LFS project's hints had a "Make any OS boot-able from any drive" hint at one time. May still be there, haven't looked for years. It was with LILO. It worked. HTH -- Bill