On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 01:10:02 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to disklabels:
>On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:53:25 +0000, David W Noon wrote: [snip] >> Your extended partition begins at sector 124. Any idea what is >> occupying sectors 0 - 123 ? > >No idea, I used cfdisk, which must have decided it was a good idea to >leave that area untouched. It doesn't show as free space. Well, sector 0 holds the MBR for the entire disk. But everybody reading this mailing list would have known that. What I suspect is in the remainder of that space is a hidden primary partition containing a "transparent" bootstrap that augments the BIOS and permits booting from a logical/extended partition. This would be similar to the old OS/2 Boot Manager, although that was hardly transparent. This hidden partition was probably placed there by cfdisk when you first partitioned the drive and started it with an extended partition. The OS/2 FDISK.COM did something similar when the first partition on a drive was not a primary (including Boot Manager). A forensic examination of that area would be of interest. -- Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* dwn...@ntlworld.com (David W Noon) *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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