various mishandlings of corrupt GPT

[Chris Murphy]

On Oct 24, 2013, at 11:51 AM, Miloslav Trmač <mitr at volny.cz> wrote:
> 
> Please let's not mix the two concepts of "tools" quoted above.
> 
> If the proposal is to run something by default on every bootup, it
> must be overwhelmingly safe, not apply heuristics that may break the
> system even more.

Right. If anything, a heuristic more sophisticated than checksum pass-fail, might indicate when NOT to do something in an unattended use context.

For instance if a valid GPT contains overlaps, yet the invalid one contains entries that do not, and that invalid entry happens to be the primary GPT which is obviously working or it wouldn't be booting the system to get to the fsck… well that'd be pretty adorable in that I don't anticipate such a possibility. But a particularly smart tool should probably just sound a klaxon somehow but otherwise alter nothing on disk; or possibly it halts boot at this point to really get the attention of the user.


Chris Murphy