Re: Partitioning
bleach <wrl@BellSouth.net> wrote:
> Paul, Linux doesn't recognize or even care about "primary" partitions.
> "fdisk", "cfdisk", etc. recognize them but only because BIOS deals with
> drives and partitions in this fashion.
Wrong. BIOS has no notion of partitions at all. Linux _does_ 'care'
about partitions - it just isn't particular about which _type_ of
partition it is installed to (like you wrote).
> The reason why there can only
> be four primary partitions is due to the design of the PC BIOS.
Wrong again - it is due to the design of the partition table, and was
(presumably) done by MS. It has _nothing_ to to with the BIOS. When
they ran into the limitation [*], they created extended partitions, of
which there can be as many as you like.
> Even lilo
> ignores the DOS, Windoz, OS2, characteristic of "not seeing" the
> "inactive" primary partitions (of course OS2 boot manager effectively does
> also).
Wrong again - DOS and Windows have no problem whatsoever with seeing
inactive primary partitions. I have four primary DOS partitions on my
first HD, and DOS sees all of them and assigns them drive letters. Only
OS/2 has this silly limitation, and OS/2's Boot Manager 'hides' (changes
the type from 4 to 0x14, or 6 to 0x16) all other primary DOS partitions
when booting one. The reason LILO doesn't care about partition tables
is that it creates a list of the physical locations of sectors to load
when booting.
Gertjan.
[*] Actually, the real reason extended partitions were created was as a
quick fix for the (then) MS-DOS limitation of not being able to access
disks that were larger than 32 MB. They removed this limitation around
DOS 4.0, IIRC.
--
Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl>
The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: