----- Original Message ----- From: "Paolo Falcone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 5:44 PM Subject: Re: [plug] partition slices in Linux
> I was asking what are the pros and cons of encapsulating a filesystem > inside a BSD-disklabel/BSD-slice partitions as compared to encapsulating > filesystems inside slices/primary partitions and/or logical partitions, > and what needs to be done to enable such. I was asking this since I was > under the impression given the fact that manipulation of the partition > table of a disk being used necessitates rebooting the machine to update > the master boot record, as well as the resulting number of partitions is > at the mercy of your architecture and device type, while the use of > BSD-slice partitions aren't covered by this limitation. Of course, I > could be wrong with my impressions thus I'd like to clarify things, > especially with pros/cons of using BSD-disklabels to encapsulate native > Linux filesystems. upon boot-up, by default the bios looks only at the master boot record marked as active partition (except if there is a boot manager because it alters the boot code of mbr) and load the corresponding boot sector.. from there, the boot sector is responsible to load the operating system... at the operating system side, the kernel just wanted to know only the physical disk structure which is given by the bios... upon the kernel knowing the disk structure, it will read mbr's partition table and assigned to a device name that is already created during installation stage... from there, you can already automatically mount or manually mount those partitions... with this scenario, you dont need to reboot everytime you add either a primary partition (and that includes the BSD slice) or extended partition... what you should do is that... use the fdisk to add a primary partition or extended partition.. create or make an appropriate device (see /dev/MAKEDEVICE) and mount it... the only thing you need to reboot if you add another physical disk in order for the bios to recognize it and im assuming that your hardware is not capable of hot pluggable... take note also that bsd slice is limited only to 8 partitions from "a" to "h" compare to extended partition which is unlimited until your disk space is exhausted... fooler. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
