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On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:20:02 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote about Re: |
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[gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to |
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disklabels: |
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>On Sunday 21 November 2010 16:22:15 David W Noon wrote: |
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> |
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>> What I suspect is in the remainder of that space is a hidden primary |
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>> partition containing a "transparent" bootstrap that augments the BIOS |
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>> and permits booting from a logical/extended partition. This would be |
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>> similar to the old OS/2 Boot Manager, although that was hardly |
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>> transparent. This hidden partition was probably placed there by |
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>> cfdisk when you first partitioned the drive and started it with an |
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>> extended partition. The OS/2 FDISK.COM did something similar when |
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>> the first partition on a drive was not a primary (including Boot |
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>> Manager). |
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>> |
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>> A forensic examination of that area would be of interest. |
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> |
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>Including attempting creation of three more primary partitions. If |
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>your hunch is right, the last will not be created as the allowable |
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>four exist already. |
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No, only 1 primary and Neil's extended partition would currently |
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exist. So it should be possible to create 2 more primaries, if there |
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were space on the disk. |
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>I don't believe your hunch is right though - it's just too complex to |
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>be worthwhile for any but a very few customers. |
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Not at all complex. OS/2 has had the option to work that way since |
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about 1987 on 80286 hardware (and written by Microsoft). |
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>Nobody's answered my parenthetical question though: why do SCSI and |
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>IDE interfaces allow different total numbers of partitions? |
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They don't. |
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The number of primary/extended partitions is limited to 4, and the |
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number of logical drives is limited by the size of the extended |
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partition. If you can fit more partitions onto one drive than another, |
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it is because either the drive is bigger or the partitions are smaller. |
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-- |
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Regards, |
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|
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Dave [RLU #314465] |
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dwnoon@××××××××.com (David W Noon) |
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