Re: Debian/WindowsNT partitioning

["Jens B. Jorgensen" <jjorgens@bdsinc.com>]

Bill Leach wrote:
> 
> Yes I am aware of this but also have experienced in the past that doing
> this (fdisk/mbr) has made it possible to partition a disk that would not
> otherwise be accepted by fdisk.  Because of what you say, I feel as though
> it borders on "FM" but possibly it has something to do with the BIOS of
> the particular machines where this has workded?

Ah, I'm willing to bet this is because the boot block contains a 
"magic number" and that fdisk will reject any disk which does not
have this magic number (perhaps it had been corrupted). Note this
excerpt from /usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt:

The MS-DOS boot sector has the following structure:

                    +------------------------+
              0x000 |Jump to the program code|
                    |------------------------|
              0x003 |                        |
                    |    Disk parameters     |
                    |                        |
                    |------------------------|
        0x02C/0x03E |                        |
                    |      Program code      |
                    |                        |
                    |                        |
                    |------------------------|
              0x1FE | Magic number (0xAA55)  |
                    +------------------------+

-- 
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com


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