Re: Partitioning
On Thu, Dec 11, 1997 at 01:01:43PM +0100, Gertjan Klein wrote:
> Bill Leach <bleach@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> What do you mean with "incompatible workarounds"? What's incompatible
> about booting from an extended partition?
>
> > I have "lost it". In as much as I really do not wish to mislead anyone
> > then by "misinformation" are you talking about my assertions with respect
> > to the BIOS design (and indeed design evolution) upon the overall
> > filesystem design, or rather my (admitted) failure to even mention that
> > there are new BIOS designs that do not themselves impose this scheme, or
> > both?
>
> Your misinformation was that:
>
> - BIOS imposes the current partitioning scheme opon us, and limits the
> number of primary partitions to four (not true - BIOS knows nothing
> about partitions and doesn't care either).
It does have the "1024 cylinders" problem though.
> - DOS, Windows and OS/2 don't see other primary partitions than the one
> they booted from (not true - DOS and Windows see other primary DOS
> partitions just fine, and OS/2 won't even boot when they are present and
> not "hidden").
As I understand it, (at least with DOS/windows/OS2), you can only "see" one
primary partition _per disk_. This was also what various HOWTO's seemed to
say.
The fact that windows (95 and NT) cannot use partitions properly - they
*require* that they are on the first primary partition on a disk - means
that partitioning is _alot_ of hard work (trust me - I've spent a week
reinstalling things and messing around).
One feature I look for in a design is easy modification in the future (which
is normally always needed for one reason or another). Most things "designed"
by MS or to do with an IBM-PC are not. This ain't a flame - it's just fact:
- BIOS date problems - compared with Unix which will eventually hit a
problem 60 years after it's "birth)
- IRQ cascading
- only now going 32-bit (cf Mac/Atari/Amiga - 32/16bit since introduction)
- FAT filesystem
- VFAT (and even NTFS IIRC) - upper/lower case confusion
- allowing spaces in filename - *completely* *braindead*
....
The PC wasn't badly designed - it just wasn't designed.
Adrian
email: adrian.bridgett@poboxes.com | Debian Linux - www.debian.org
http://www.poboxes.com/adrian.bridgett | Because bloated, unstable
PGP key available on public key servers | operating systems are from MS
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