> Yes. A protective mbr is in the specification. Protective means: Not to be > used for fiddling.
the spec says that the protective mbr should include entries reserving the space used by gpt partitions. thus if you use fdisk to edit such a partition table, you will not harm gpt unless you delete the gpt entries. they are quite clear that this is for compatability. if you can cite chapter and verse showing that this is incorrect, i'm all ears. > - One potential method to provide access to contiguous disk space may be a > rich partitioning > system, e.g. GPT. > - Plan9 does not support the last idea. the plan 9 kernel doesn't read partition tables. this is done by external programs. e.g. disk/fdisk and disk/prep and 9load. devsd allows partition tables to be written to /dev/sdXX/ctl. devsd partitions are dynamicly allocated. there is no limit to how many you can have without inventing a new format, disk/prep uses just a single sector. so it supports about 16 partitions. however, you can repartition each prep partition. so with 2 levels on a drive with standard-sized sectors, you can have 239 partitions. nonetheless, using partitions as a fs is a terrible idea. - erik
