Re: partition counting for Alpha

[Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Nikita Schmidt <cetus@snowball.ucd.ie> writes:

> On Friday, 27 Nov, David van Leeuwen wrote:
> > 
> > Q: Is there a maximum of 4 primary partitions, even for SCSI/Alpha (I
> >    thought that that limit was a MSDOS/Bios/IDE limit).  I believe SUN
> >    uses many partition on a singe SCSI disk. 
> > 
> 
> Yes.  SUN, BSD, Digital UNIX use different partitioning scheme that
> allows for 8 partitions.  Microsoft, however, has shamelessly yet
> carefully brought in the traditional PCish partition table stuff that
> has 4 primary partitions and that ugly hack called extended partitions.
> As long as you use ARC/AlphaBIOS console, you can only boot from a
> PC-style partitioned hard drive.

Amiga's use another partitioning scheme, that alows for arbitrary many
partitions. Also any is bootable, and the filesystem can be stored in
the bootsectors, so that one can boot from any fs format, where a
filesystem exists for AmigaOS. Additional Information, such as the
mountpoint, the label, the flags,... can be stored in the partitioning
blocks. Effectively, one wouldn't need an /etc/fstab. I think the
AmigaOS way of partitioning is the best and most flexible.
Unfortunatly good thinks die and bad thinks live forever.

> As for MILO and partitions, I think 2.0.35-based Debian MILOs would see
> them in a normal way.

My milo sees them all and I think its a 2.0.32 or something
similar.

May the Source be with you.
			Goswin