Comment 50 for bug 8978

db,

That could work with respect to writing the installer then verifying it except for one thing. In the cases where this problem is caused by the controller bios it typically doesn't overwrite the sectors immediately, but only after reboot (which reinitializes the bios). So the installer couldn't really check for it unless there was some sort of multistage install which involved rebooting the machine back onto the installer media (generally cd).

lilo should avoid this problem since if I remember correctly it only uses the boot sector in cylinder 0 and the rest of it is written into the partition of the installed OS.

Chris