> "Charles M. Hannum" writes:
> > If I understand this correctly, the suggested pullup actually makes
> > fdisk *unable* to reinitialize the MBR should I want to do so.  That's
> > extremely bogus.
> 
> Actually, that isn't quite correct. You can still re-initialize it,
> just not with only the -i flag -- you have to explicitly zero out the
> four MBR partitions as well. The -i flag now only re-initializes the
> code part of the MBR.

Precisely.  Now I have to use a semi-magic invocation of dd(1) to do
what I want, because there's a fairly arbitrary restriction in
fdisk(8).  That's lame.  It's also distinctly *un*like what the DOS
FDISK does -- and it's actually pretty broken, in that it assumes that
the signature being present means there's valid boot code.