On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 3:16 AM, Tony Abernethy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > DOS/Windows has the screwball partitioning system. > The initial sector contains the initial boot sector which is used > to find the bootable partition and read the next sector of the bootstrap.
Not to quibble, but the IBM/Microsoft model MBR model anticipated the need for multiple logical partitions & multibooting different OS'es. Yes, it isn't like other architectures like Sun or Apple, but note that Sun is a descendent of BSD & Apple mimicked Sun. Some might think that OpenFirmware/OpenBoot is odd, but all of this is simply a question of semantics. > Main thing is to realize that the word partition is really two very > different words: DOS Partition (there are 4 primary partitions on disk) > and OBSD Partition (there are 16 stored on the disk) The Sun & *BSD worlds used to call disklabel partitions "slices", but the term has since faded. > 1) I did NOT unstick myself --- whatever I clobbered does not YET matter. > > 2) kinda obvious the 'c' partition is how OpenBSD talks to the disk itself > (instead of just to an OpenBSD (as opposed to DOS) partition > > It is possible that 'c' is required on some architectures and not on others. > In which case, you're ahead to keep from messing up something which cannot > be portable. Traditionally, partition 'c' was meant to serve as a backdoor to back-up software which could save all partitions at once. One might be able to function for quite some time without 'c', but I wouldn't want to try it. Working on a system that is in a questionable state simply isn't my idea of a great date... Jim _______________________________________________ Openbsd-newbies mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.theapt.org/listinfo/openbsd-newbies
