Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 11:50 -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> Just curious: you script the creation of an identical partition table,
> and then you copy 446 bytes which specifically copies the MBR without 
> the partition table which is in bytes 447-512. Why not just copy the 
> entire 512 bytes to all the disks from the first one?
> I guess one reason might be if the disks did not have identical CHS 
> geometry, which can happen for the identically sized disks. I have heard 
> rumors that even a single model drives had been seen with different 
> geometries in different firmware revisions.

I'm paranoid, that why :)
While in most machines, I have identical drives from the same
manufacturer, in others, I specifically buy drive of the same size, but
from different manufacturers and even different dates to reduce the risk
of simultaneous death of multiple drives. (Same drive, same
manufacturer, same batch, same day, etc)
As you pointed out, different drives, can have more-or-less identical
partition size, with different CHS in the partition table.

As I don't trust myself to use the -right- size every time (446 vs 512),
I simply assume the worse.

-- 
Gilboa Davara
http://www.wirex-systems.com