Yes, I didnt formulate very carefully.
If you have LILO there and do mke2fs then LILO will be wiped out.
True, but if you run mke2fs on the full disk (i.e., /dev/sda), then
whatever OS's LILO would have been booting will probably have gotten
wiped out by the loss of the partition table anyway.
It is true that ext2 reserves space, but mke2fs likes to zero that out.
The reason why mke2fs zero's out the first 1024 bytes of the partition
or device which it is initializing is to avoid having the partition
recognized as a FAT partition. People were losing by accidentally
mounting an ext2 filesystem as a FAT filesystem, and then writing to
that FAT filesystem --- and then getting very unhappy when they realized
they'd just wiped out some large, unknown amount of data on their ext2
filesystem. By zero'ing out the initial 1024 bytes, we avoid this
particular possibility.
- Ted
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