A couple of weeks ago I upgraded GRUB on my Arch Linux box, to switch from GRUB1 to the new GRUB2. During the installation of the bootloader (grub-install) I got a warning:
Sector 33 is already in use by FlexNet; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track.
I searched over the net and it seems that this issue is caused by Adobe DRM for Windows. No, I don’t use Windows but I’ve bought my actual computer from a friend of mine a couple of year ago. Despite the fact that I formatted the disk before installing Arch Linux, FlexNet ramined on the disk (maybe for a fast formatting procedure, I didn’t do a low level formatting). To delete those datas, open a terminal and digit the following 2 commands (as root):
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 seek=xx
# grub-install
The first one (change “xx” with the sector number where GRUB has found FlexNet, in my case it was 33) erase every data from the selected sector, while the second one reinstalls GRUB. Check the output of the command to see if the installer says something about the presence of unwanted datas, but you should not receive any warning anymore 😉
