[PLUG] Why create a boot partition?

[Michael C. Robinson]

Isn't a drive something that can be looked at as a series of writable
locations from 0 to some high number where some of these locations 
need to have partition start and partition end written to them?  Why 
won't Microsoft and everyone else agree that partitioning should be
defined outside any operating system where a recognized hardware API
could then be made to work for everyone wanting to access that drive?  
I would think this would solve a lot of problems with the OS not 
looking at the drive geometry correctly. 
 
What does partition alignment really mean?  Is it like memory 
alignment where you use packing of nibbles to create bytes 
because the architecture has a certain word size or something?  
If these counters were part of the drive controller would we 
ever have had the 10 bit counter limit or 1024 cylinders?
I guess this as a red herring though like the making
everyone implement PTR records in their dns.

It's a shame you can't treat an eighty gig drive as two seperate
drives accessed as drive one and drive two.  This would allow
partitioning in one way on one half and a different way on the
other half addressing the issue of Windoze or dos wants the
drive to be set up differently quite nicely.

An annoyance regarding PC's is that there are assumptions built
into them about drives and such that just seem to needlessly 
lead to trouble.

     --  Michael