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> After looking through these many many many different types of > partitions.......Maybe it's best if the BIOS folks just continue > to support just the one we do now > rather then open that can marked "WORMS". I think you misunderstand. There are many ways of indicating how a disk is partitioned into sub-disks. Plan 9 uses a text file, BSD variants have their disk label that describes the "slices", there are Apple, SGI, AIX and other partitioning systems. In the PC world the most common partitioning system used to be the DOS-type partition table, four 16-byte entries. One of these bytes is the type field. This type field has been (and is) used for lots of purposes: indicate the operating system, indicate the file system, indicate the mount point, indicate that a partition is hidden, indicate that a partition is part of a fault tolerant set, indicate that a partition is to be accessed using LBA rather than CHS, etc. etc. This is your can of worms, and we have had it the past twenty years. But now this DOS-type partition table is dying. Some would say it is dead already, but it doesn't know yet. The CHS part of it is dead, because disks are larger than 8 GB. The LBA part of it is dead, because RAIDs are larger than 2 TB. The type part is dead, because the name space is too small. So, we are on a migration path away from all this old junk. Andries Subscribe/Unsubscribe instructions can be found at www.t13.org.
