[ILUG] dying hard disc - upgrade questions?

[Brian Foster]

On Tue, 18 May 2004 16:55:31 +0100 Timothy Murphy managed to misunderstand:
> On Tuesday 18 May 2004 16:34, Brian Foster wrote:
> >  still don't have a completely consistent picture
> >  of how extended partitions work --- concern here
> >  is the non-Linux systems (e.g., BSD and Plan9
> >  [ ... ]) I'd like to try.  main confusion
> >  at the moment is how many logicals per extended
> >  there can be?  I've read that whilst Linux does
> >  support more than one, other systems may not;
> >  also, [ I (still!) cannot find an unambiguous maximum
> >  of logicals per extended ] --- very confusing!   ;-(
> 
> You're making a perfectly simple matter ridiculously complicated.
> No-one in the history of the universe ever had more than one
> extended partition.
> Why would you want two?
> What possible advantage would it have?
> Do you really want more than 13 partitions?
> You can certainly have hda4 as an extended partiton,
> with logical partitions hda5 - hda14.

    ( apologies if this is badly formated or
     hard to read for some technical reason;
     I'm still configuring my SUSE 9.1 system
     to my tastes, and know I haven't got all
     the details _correct_ yet ....  ;-\   )

 NO.  No. no!, *no* .... I was trying to keep things _SIMPLE_
 by _understanding_ the theory:  as it turned out, there were
 several points which had to brought together (to answer my
 original question, “what is the best practice?‟, within the
 parameter I set, “extended partitions are new to me‟):

  + extended partitions should only be be the last in each table
    (and indeed, in the last (4th) slot of the MBRs table);

  + there is an indeterminate number of logical partitions per
    extended;

  + each table within an extended should consist of just one
    logical optionally followed by a pointer to another table
    _within_ the same extended;
 and
  + not all software (e.g., O/S's) like/tolerate/grok anything
    else; nor can all boot from a logical.

 putting all of that theory together you do indeed come to the
 conclusion there can be at most one extended which must be hd¿4.

 it took quite a _lot_ of reading between the lines of various
 FAQs, HowTo's, and so on to determine the above!  (no one
 document I found coherently explained _all_ of the above;
 and of course, I really wanted to find two independent docs
 which both competently explained what I wanted to know.)

 and, I am pleased to note, the SUSE 9.1 installer did not let
 me do anything else (I tried, but not exhaustively).¹  so, in
 a sense, my concerns were foundationless --- but it is (IMHO)
 nice to verify the s/w is not doing anything stupid.

cheers!
	-blf-

  ¹ I did manage to confuse it; e.g., one time it thought
   there should be three ‘hdb3‛s .....   ;-(

-- 
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