On Fri, Jul 07, 2000 at 04:45:54PM +0530, Narain CR typed:
> >>> what happens if one removes (or adds) a logical
> >>> drive in the first partition ?
> I beg to differ here. This numbering is the same as with primary
> partitions, we create 4 then merge 2 to get one bigger partition - the
> system doesn't get screwed up... There is just a missing number - we had
> hda1, hda2, hda3 and hda4 earlier, now after merging 2&3 into 2 we have
> hda1, hda2 and hda4. It may be same here or probably the numbering is
> absolutely dynamic with logical partitions... Got to try it out though...
>
Sorry - you misread me. When I said add/remove logical drives - I didn't
mean merge "primary" partitions. The primary partitions have fixed numbers
and there's no problem if one of them is missing.
But for extended partitions it's a different matter altogether. Suppose you
make 2 extended partitions say hda3 & hda4 and start creating logical
partitions in hda4 (leaving hda3 blank), what number would linux allocate ?
hda5 ?? If so, now you go and create another one inside hda3, it would
have to allocate the number as hda6 as per your logic. Unfortunately
partition tables do not belong to linux and so it has no way of recording
these numbers (hda5/6 etc) inside the partition table structure. So linux
wouldn't be able to make out later which partition is hda5 & which is hda6
and get thoroughly screwed up.
I suspect Linux might ignore the second extended partition altogether if
found on a hard disk. It appears the most sane thing to do and that's the
way I would write the file system code if I were doing it..
Did I confuse you totally ?
Kala
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