bleach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Paul, Linux doesn't recognize or even care about "primary" partitions. > "fdisk", "cfdisk", etc. recognize them but only because BIOS deals with > drives and partitions in this fashion.
Wrong. BIOS has no notion of partitions at all. Linux _does_ 'care' about partitions - it just isn't particular about which _type_ of partition it is installed to (like you wrote). > The reason why there can only > be four primary partitions is due to the design of the PC BIOS. Wrong again - it is due to the design of the partition table, and was (presumably) done by MS. It has _nothing_ to to with the BIOS. When they ran into the limitation [*], they created extended partitions, of which there can be as many as you like. > Even lilo > ignores the DOS, Windoz, OS2, characteristic of "not seeing" the > "inactive" primary partitions (of course OS2 boot manager effectively does > also). Wrong again - DOS and Windows have no problem whatsoever with seeing inactive primary partitions. I have four primary DOS partitions on my first HD, and DOS sees all of them and assigns them drive letters. Only OS/2 has this silly limitation, and OS/2's Boot Manager 'hides' (changes the type from 4 to 0x14, or 6 to 0x16) all other primary DOS partitions when booting one. The reason LILO doesn't care about partition tables is that it creates a list of the physical locations of sectors to load when booting. Gertjan. [*] Actually, the real reason extended partitions were created was as a quick fix for the (then) MS-DOS limitation of not being able to access disks that were larger than 32 MB. They removed this limitation around DOS 4.0, IIRC. -- Gertjan Klein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
