On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 05:53:13PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> In Sun, 05 Nov 2000 23:14:16 +1100 Glenn McGrath <bug1@optushome.com.au> cum veritate scripsit :
>
> > > > I understand how msdos partition tables work now, its just a bunch of
> > > > ugly hacks to make use of legacy structures that are long obsolete.
> > > >
> > > > msdos partitions need to be supported for machines that need microsoft
> > > > compatability (and other OS's ?), but i think that we should provided
> > > > users the ability to create a non-crap partition table.
> > >
> > > You need them to boot.
> > Oh, really... is that a limitation of the bootloader or the kernel, i
> > just assumed you could boot from any partition table the kernel
> > supported.
>
> On a PC, BIOS needs to be able to read it first, before anything else.
The BIOS simply reads & executes the MBR. You can replace the MBR code with
code to read any partition table/disklabel. 'Dangerously dedicated' *BSD
disklabels are probably the best examples of this on ix86 systems ...
Timshel
--
Timshel Knoll <timshel@pobox.com> for Debian email: <timshel@debian.org>
Second year Computer Science, RMIT | CS108 Tutor (Semester 2, 2000)
Debian GNU/Linux developer, see http://www.debian.org/~timshel/
For GnuPG public key: finger timshel@ozemail.com.au or timshel@debian.org
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