BTW: Welcome back, Dave. I hope this attempt of our project won't go the same way as the last times :-) But I have some good news, coming in later mails... :)))
On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, Dave Cinege wrote:
Isn't it about time the x86 platform supported more then 4 'real' partitions?
True..
I'm getting really sick of this limitation and was thinking of sitting down with some peers, drafting a new extended MBR standard, then submitting it OS vendors.
For instance, the first partition is (generally) started on the 65th sector. That leaves 63 512byte sectors that are always free. Why not extend the normal partition entires say 16 sectors (== about 512 16byte partition entires), and reserve the remaining sectors for extended MBR code? (IE the code in sector 0, hops to sector 18)
This would be very easy to implement and remain compatible with legacy OS's. A boot manager (partition entry swapper) program could be used to move 'extended' entries in and out of the original sector 0 partition table for the sake of further legacy OS compatibility.
Hmm.. why invent the wheel new? We could let's say use the Amiga RDB standard which allows nearly unlimited partitions by having data organized in linked lists. Or BSD Disklabel with it's 8 or 16 partitions The advantage of this way would be that all Linux and *BSD systems, which interpret disklabels themselves, would support new partitions at once and you would not have to write any new fdisks or sth like that
I'll set up a mailing list/and or have some IRC meetings to discuss details.
Hmm IRC is a good idea.. Do you think we should have an own IRC server or use EFnet or IRCnet (I am on IRCnet all the time, so I'd vote for IRCnet, but I don't really matter)
Regards, Stefan