On Sunday 21 November 2010 16:22:15 David W Noon wrote: > What I suspect is in the remainder of that space is a hidden primary > partition containing a "transparent" bootstrap that augments the BIOS > and permits booting from a logical/extended partition. This would be > similar to the old OS/2 Boot Manager, although that was hardly > transparent. This hidden partition was probably placed there by > cfdisk when you first partitioned the drive and started it with an > extended partition. The OS/2 FDISK.COM did something similar when > the first partition on a drive was not a primary (including Boot > Manager). > > A forensic examination of that area would be of interest.
Including attempting creation of three more primary partitions. If your hunch is right, the last will not be created as the allowable four exist already. I don't believe your hunch is right though - it's just too complex to be worthwhile for any but a very few customers. Nobody's answered my parenthetical question though: why do SCSI and IDE interfaces allow different total numbers of partitions? Has one of them stolen a bit for more urgent use elsewhere? -- Rgds Peter. Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23.
