Signature of Acer utility corrupting grub2

[Rickard Westman]

I don't know if you are still interested in signatures of Windows utilities corrupting grub2, but in case you are, I have attached two hexdumps I made last year when I had this problem with Ubuntu 10.10 and an Acer registration utility. Sorry they are not dd dumps, but it's the same information you requested and I think it is fairly clear what happened (an entire block was overwritten at sector 18 / offset 0x2400). Searching for the signature with Google, I also found these URLs, which report the exact same contents at the same offset:

  http://www.siteduzero.com/forum-83-584790-p1-acer-7741g.html

  http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/forum/2010/04/9913/report.txt

  http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=436731

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks! I've committed a fix upstream to avoid sectors matching this signature.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

2013-01-21 Colin Watson <email address hidden>

 * grub-core/partmap/msdos.c (embed_signatures): Add the signature of
 an Acer registration utility with several sightings in the wild.
 Reported by: Rickard Westman. Fixes Ubuntu bug #987022.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package grub2 - 2.02~beta2-5

---------------
grub2 (2.02~beta2-5) experimental; urgency=medium

  * Add a number of EFI debugging commands to the signed image (lsefi,
    lsefimmap, lsefisystab, lssal).
  * Add gfxterm_background to the signed image so that background_image
    works in UEFI Secure Boot mode. Thanks to syscon-hh for the report.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 27 Jan 2014 10:03:00 +0000