Steve Gehlbach steve@nexpath.com writes:
Eric W. Biederman wrote:
The BOOT_IDE driver has been modified in strange ways to find things in the first partition and I have not had a chance to look over the code to see what is going on there yet.
Not strange to me, by default it simply skips 63x512 bytes (0x7e00), which is normally for most disks today where partition 1 starts. Of course, it should read and decode the partition table, but this is much harder.
No. I very deliberately do not read partition tables. And not because it is difficult, but more because there is not a consensus (especially across architectures) on what partition tables should look like.
The code used to work just like the etherboot code and read the first 8K but that has obviously changed while I was not looking.
Current x86 partition tables are limited to 2TB disks. Not an immediate problem I admit but with 120+GB drives today it is a limit we are quickly approaching.
Eric