On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:20:02 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to disklabels:
>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. No, only 1 primary and Neil's extended partition would currently exist. So it should be possible to create 2 more primaries, if there were space on the disk. >I don't believe your hunch is right though - it's just too complex to >be worthwhile for any but a very few customers. Not at all complex. OS/2 has had the option to work that way since about 1987 on 80286 hardware (and written by Microsoft). >Nobody's answered my parenthetical question though: why do SCSI and >IDE interfaces allow different total numbers of partitions? They don't. The number of primary/extended partitions is limited to 4, and the number of logical drives is limited by the size of the extended partition. If you can fit more partitions onto one drive than another, it is because either the drive is bigger or the partitions are smaller. -- Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* [email protected] (David W Noon) *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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