John R Pierce wrote: > the rest of the space between the sector 0 MBR and the first primary > partition is completely empty, nothing puts anything there. You say that with supreme self-confidence, but I have just looked at 3 disks with eg [tim at helen tmp]$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=sdb.mbr bs=2048 count=1 and in each case there is material after the MBR, eg "od -c" shows two have the following at the same place 0001360 376 L o a d i n g s t a g e 1 . 0001400 5 \0 . \0 \r \n \0 G e o m \0 R e a d 0001420 \0 E r r o r \0 273 001 \0 264 016 315 020 F while the third has 0001420 \0 353 376 l o a d i n g \0 . \0 \r \n \0 0001440 G e o m \0 R e a d \0 E r r o r I don't know if this is relevant, but the first two were on machines running CentOS and grub, while the third was on a machine running Fedora and grub2 . I notice that the file command, surprisingly, seems to analyze the MBRs, thus answering my original query, though with slightly different outputs from grub and grub2 machines. Eg [tim at helen tmp]$ file sdb.mbr sdb.mbr: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3, stage2 address 0x2000, stage2 segment 0x200, GRUB version 0.94; partition 1: ID ... [tim at rose ~]$ file sda.mbr sda.mbr: ; partition 1: ID=0x7, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 167774145 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x83, starthead 254, startsector 167774208, 8388608 sectors; ... -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland