Adrian Levi wrote:
For the list, On 09/02/2008, s. keeling <keeling@nucleus.com> wrote:Yeah, I think this stuff (talking to Win*) sucks too. And this is a Win* problem (sorry) but I'm a Debian user, not a Win* user, so I'm ignorant wrt this stuff. 4 Gb pendrive from Staples: (0) phreaque [root] /etc_ fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 4103 MB, 4103938560 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 498 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 38 305203+ b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda2 39 127 714892+ b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda3 * 128 225 787185 83 Linux /dev/sda4 226 498 2192872+ 83 Linux Plugging that into the corporate WinXP laptop only displays the first ca. 300 Mb ptn. Why doesn't it see the 2nd? How have I borked the ptn table? [Knoppix and /scratch are on the two 83s, yet to be tested. :-)]Please correct me if i'm wrong but I thought that windows could only handle one primary partition per device. Perhaps that is where your problem lies. remake your pendrive with cylinders 39 127 as sda5 (extended) and you should be fine I think. Adrian
It's been a loooong time since I've dealt with this ;)A hard disk can, as others have noted, have up to 4 primary partitions. But Windows (and MSDOS), can only use/see one of them at a time. This goes back to when Microsoft was DOS only and hard disks were first becoming available.
The primary partition has a maximum size limit, so when larger hard disks arrived, a solution was needed. But backwards compatibility was maintained by leaving the primary partition as is and adding the 'extended' partition feature, with 'logical' partitions in it.
So, why allow multiple primary partitions? Because Microsoft was looking to support booting multiple operating systems, one of which was called Xenix (UNIX V7 derived OS). Then, there was also OS2. To boot a different OS, you had to load an fdisk program to reset the active partition. Rather clumsy, but it did work.
DOS, and then Windows, allowed seeing only the active primary partition because it was the boot environment, and MS presumed that some other OS, that DOS was not compatible with, would reside on any other primary partitions (this is a theory on my part, but seems to fit the facts).
As for the statement by several posters that Win98 can see more than one partition, I have no idea why that would be. Perhaps it's a bug?-)
-- Bob McGowan
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