OFFTOPIC: New MBR and partitioning standard?

Dave Cinege dcinege at psychosis.com
Tue Mar 9 12:15:46 CET 1999


Taral wrote:
> 
> 
> Why wait for general acceptance? An extension of this sort can be implemented
> OS-by-OS, with non-compatible OS's using the old extended partition system.
> Just put some kind of checksum and magic number in the extended MBR area :)

A main point to this is better multiple OS interoperabilty. This is
not specifically about better use by Linux.

Example, and what finally got me to post this request:

sda1
BOOT partition. After having had it wiped out so much and dealing with 'too far
down the disk' bios retardation, I finally put boot managers, kernels, etc in
a small partition at the beginning of the disk.

sda2
DOS partition. For some reason I seem to need this time to time.

sda3
NT partition. After fighting with the fucking thing I finally gave it a primary
since it has a tendency to not boot when in a logical. 

sda4
Extended logical. And all my ext2 partitions.

Solaris. NO ROOM. It needs a primary.
FreeBSD. NO ROOM. It needs a primary.
etc, etc.

To clarifiy, understand that only a primary is a 'real' partition. An extended
DOS partition, is no different then UFS. IE a primary that is logically
subdivided.

When you create a logically subdivided partition, the entired area it
occupies is locked only for logical use. Any space freed up (unless at the very
end) can not be reallocted to another primary. Thus dealing only in primary
partitions is a much more flexable and efficient when it comes to changing
partitions on a 'live' machine.

Ideally we could start from scratch, rewrite the BIOS, and standardize the
allocation of small for all partitioning  and boot managment. We would then
have...a workstation.  : >

But the idea is to come up with SOMETHING that is easy to code, and slips
into most system will no effort, and that WILL BE adopted and implemented
by yo-yo's like Microsoft.

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