Fwd: Re: MBR was destroyed

[wino at piments.com]

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:05:28 +0100, seorge <seorge at gmail.com> wrote:

> Please tell me, what exact information should I provide the developers  
> with
> the experiment described below.
> I really want to help, but I also don't want to play with my data without
> understanding what exactly is needed from me.
> Thanks in advance!
>
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
>> Ok, and can restore ~/.wine dir to previous state (maybe "rm -rf ~/.wine
>> && wineprefixcreate" would help) and reproduce this bug again, please?
>
> I've removed my previous .wine dirrectory, so the only thing I can do is  
> to
> reproduce everything happend with me yesturday:
> 1. try to launch some win32 application - this will create .wine
> 2. try to setup disks and change labels.
> As I undestand after this experiment I need to send something or at the
> mailing list from the content of the .wine. Please tell me what it  
> should be.
>
>
>
>

Saulius wrote:
You may run dd command to retrieve MBR at every moment, calculate it's
checksum and see whether it differs or not.

Excellent idea. makes testing a whole lot easier . Now we all know what  
the result is we just need to find out what actions trigger a write to the  
disk.

I suggest:
add user to disk group, if not already ;)

backup mbr:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/hda.wine0.mbr bs=512 count=1
mount /mnt/fd  (adjust as necessary to your config)
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/fd/hda.mbr bs=512 count=1
umount /mnt/fd

fiddle with wine, one step at a time , running the following check at each  
step, keeping notes on what is done each time.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/hda.wine1.mbr bs=512 count=1
diff /tmp/*0.mbr /tmp/*1.mbr

If diff returns a blank fiddle a bit harder!

Once you get a hit , post both the files and a note about exactly what  
step you did to provoke a change.

Recover your MBR:
dd of=/dev/hda if=/tmp/hda.wine0.mbr bs=512 count=1

remove user from disk group ( and/or stop using wine !! )


The main thing is to establish exactly what you did, it may not be quite  
where you thought and it will make finding the offending code a lot  
quicker if it is precisely linked to one event.

A new element came out in your last post that you run unconfigured wine  
for the first time by "clicking on a file", this brings a whole lot of  
other things into the picture , so please note _everything_ you do from  
the begining.

I have been unable to reproduce this bug on Gentoo which also has the same  
permissions on /dev/hda .

HTH