Pascal Cavy wrote:
I suspect diskdrake to have a bug in certain conditions.All logical partitions must be in cylinder order in the various MBRs along the extended chain
I have noticed several mdk installations where fdisk or cfdisk complains about overlapping partitions, or partitions not ending on cylinder boundary (for ex the first primary ending on 788 for exemple and the extented partition starting at 788 too !). It was the case on MDK90, I dont know if it's still true on MDK9.1B1 ?
for Windows. Partition Magic does this.
On the other hand, Linux utilities create MBR entries in order of partition creation time.
This is true for fdisk and cfdisk, to my knowledge. Windows cannot handle this.
Linux partition managers also fail to set up the CHS numbers to reflect the LBA numbers.
Accordingly, Linux-created partitions cannot be guaranteed to be acceptable to Windows.
The best solution I know is never to create partitions except with Partition Magic (which
does not support ext3, Reiserfs, etc.) or you must dedicate a hard drive to Windows
partitions only if you need to double-boot with Windows. You could also choose to
dedicate an entire machine to Windows only.
Yes, you can also use cfdisk etc very carefully, making sure that all partitions are created
and exist in start cylinder order.
It is long past time that the Linux community or FSF produced a GPL all-OS-compatible
Partition Manager that includes resizing, copying, deleting, undeleting, checking, formatting,
converting (retaining file integrity), labelling. setting active, defragging,
defragging by file-oriented copy out format copy back, info, bad sector handling,
partition hiding, resize root capacity, resize clusters, etc.
--
Ron. [Melbourne, Australia]
20030106 updates now available for Fastest Mandrake downloader (English-only) from:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/ronst/
