Re: Partitioning
On Fri, 12 Dec 1997, Adrian Bridgett wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 1997 at 01:01:43PM +0100, Gertjan Klein wrote:
> > Bill Leach <bleach@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> > 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.
Yes, but modern workarounds like LBA mode and CHS mode work quite well
with Linux.
> > - 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.
No, no, no. Try this:
- take a computer that has one hard disk with one primary partition and
DOS (any version that can be booted from that hard disk, so MS-DOS 1.0
probably won't work) installed on that partition.
- use the free FIPS utility to split the partition.
- now you have a working DOS system with two primary partitions that are
both recognised (and can be used normally) by DOS.
> 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).
Indeed they cannot use them *properly*, but they can use them. Don't
bother trying installing DOS on the second primary partition. But it will
recognise any other DOS partitions you have once it is booted.
> 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*
> ....
Now, of all these facts the only one you call braindead is exactly the
only one that isn't braindead. Any decent OS allows spaces in filenames,
including Linux and anything else that looks like Unix. In fact, on an
ext2fs partition you can use any character except ASCII 0 [1] in a
filename, including <CR>, <LF>, *, ?, (, ), \ and even / . Many programs
don't work properly with many of these characters, but those problems are
bugs in the programs -- the filesystem allows the characters, so the
programs operating on the filesystem should handle them.
Remco
[1] this is used internally by the filesystem to indicate the end of a
filename, so obviously you can't use it inside a filename
--
If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kick-boxing
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