[GTALUG] Windows eats Fedora installation sticks

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 12:31:26PM -0400,  wrote:
> It appears windows takes it upon itself to "fix" the GPT.  It changes the
> offset to the end of disk and where the backup partition table should be,
> and the checksum.
> 
> I suspect a USB key without a GPT would not be affected.
> 
>  000001e0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
>  000001f0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 55aa  ..............U.
>  00000200: 4546 4920 5041 5254 0000 0100 5c00 0000  EFI PART....\...
> 
> -00000210: 00f9 743c 0000 0000 0100 0000 0000 0000  ................ <- checksum first 4 bytes
> +00000210: 5acf 1fd8 0000 0000 0100 0000 0000 0000  ................
> 
> -00000220: f76b 4400 0000 0000 4000 0000 0000 0000  ........ at ....... <- location of backup GPT first 8 bytes
> +00000220: ff7f 3707 0000 0000 4000 0000 0000 0000  ........ at .......
> 
> -00000230: b86b 4400 0000 0000 7de2 0cbd e0a6 374c  ........}.....7L <- last usable sector of device first 8 bytes
> +00000230: c07f 3707 0000 0000 7de2 0cbd e0a6 374c  ........}.....7L
> 
>  00000240: beec ab4b 6f9b 6a73 0200 0000 0000 0000  ...Ko.js........
>  00000250: f800 0000 8000 0000 8bbd c3e0 0000 0000  ................
>  00000260: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
> 
> I must admit I always found the media check in redhat weird.  Like how
> unreliable do you think media is these days?  And don't your packages
> have checksums on them so it would fail if there was a media error?
> Wasting time checking the media before installing compared to the minute
> chance of it failing during the install?  I don't get it.  I don't recall
> if Debian has a media check option, although if it does I have certainly
> never used it.

I just checked debian's installer and they only use a DOS MBR partition
table, not a GPT like fedora.  So that avoids getting corrupted I guess,
and they still have an efi boot partition of course, so it will boot
just fine on modern machines.  Not sure why fedora decided to make their
installer image more complicated than it had to be.  I don't see where
they would have any benefit from it.

-- 
Len Sorensen