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From: Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
To: John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>
Cc: Andries Brouwer <aebr@win.tue.nl>,
	Szakacsits Szabolcs <szaka@sienet.hu>,
	Apurva Mehta <apurva@gmx.net>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	bug-parted@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Disk Geometries reported incorrectly on 2.6.0-testX
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2003 18:01:03 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20031129170103.GA6092@iliana> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <200311291350.hATDo0CY001142@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk>

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 01:50:00PM +0000, John Bradford wrote:
> > Let me continue to stress: geometry does not exist.
> > Consequently, it cannot change.
> > fdisk does not set any geometry, it writes a partition table.
> > 
> > Start and size of each partition are given twice: in absolute sector
> > units (LBA) and in CHS units. The former uses 32 bits, and with 512-byte
> > sectors this works up to 2TB. People are starting to hit that boundary now.
> > The latter uses 24 bits, which works up to 8GB. Modern systems no longer
> > use it (but the details are complicated).
> 
> Why don't we take the opporunity to make all CHS code configurable out
> of the kernel, and define a new, more compact, partition table format
> which used LBA exclusively, and allowed more than four partitions in
> the main partition table?

The only problem is that your BIOS will probably not be able to boot
from it, so unless you use some kind of free bios implementation or even
some kind of free OF or something such, you will never be able to boot
from these drives.

For non booting drives, nothing stops you from using alternate partition
tables, the Mac OS on as well as the Amiga partition tables seems nice
to me (maybe others too, but i mostly know these two of the alternative
partition tables) as these are simply linked list of partition entries,
you can have as many as you want (limit to 128 partitions for amiga
partition in the libparted implementation i made for example).

Friendly,

Sven Luther

  parent reply	other threads:[~2003-11-29 17:03 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2003-11-28  4:58 Disk Geometries reported incorrectly on 2.6.0-testX Apurva Mehta
2003-11-28 14:24 ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-29  2:22   ` Andrew Clausen
2003-11-29  5:16     ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-11-29  9:18       ` Sven Luther
2003-11-29 12:41         ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-30 11:44           ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-11-30 15:19             ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-29 12:34       ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-29 13:50         ` John Bradford
2003-11-29 14:04           ` Stefan Smietanowski
2003-11-29 17:01           ` Sven Luther [this message]
2003-11-29 22:14             ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-29 22:44               ` Sven Luther
2003-11-30  0:39                 ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-30  9:35               ` Sergey Vlasov
2003-11-29 22:31           ` Andrew Clausen
2003-11-30  8:57             ` Arjan van de Ven
2003-11-30  7:38               ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-11-30 10:40               ` John Bradford
2003-11-30 11:24                 ` Sven Luther
2003-11-30 13:48                   ` John Bradford
2003-11-30 17:22                     ` Sven Luther
2003-11-30 23:51                 ` Andrew Clausen
2003-11-30 22:54               ` Andrew Clausen
2003-11-29 22:27         ` Andrew Clausen
2003-11-30  0:34           ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-30 11:10             ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-11-30 13:26               ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-30 12:34                 ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-11-30 15:46                   ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-29 22:33       ` Andrew Clausen
2003-11-30  9:16         ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-12-03 11:05           ` Andrew Clausen
2003-12-03 11:28             ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-12-03 11:54               ` Andrew Clausen
2003-12-03 13:07                 ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-12-03 23:27                   ` Andrew Clausen
2003-12-03 21:55                     ` Szakacsits Szabolcs
2003-12-03 23:47                     ` bill davidsen
     [not found] <200311300220.hAU2K0dr019280@sunrise.pg.gda.pl>
2003-11-30  2:22 ` Andrzej Krzysztofowicz
2003-11-30 13:13   ` Andries Brouwer
2003-11-30 13:58     ` John Bradford
2003-11-30  7:08 Norman Diamond
2003-11-30  7:08 Norman Diamond
2003-11-30 12:49 ` Andries Brouwer
2003-12-03 11:06   ` Andrew Clausen
2003-12-03 14:42     ` Andries Brouwer
2003-12-03 23:11       ` Andrew Clausen

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