[PLUG] Why create a boot partition?

[Ed Sawicki]

On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 14:58, Michael C. Robinson wrote:
> > Why two? Why not 4, 8, 16, 32, etc?
> > 
> > You can treat it as separate drives. That's what partitions do.
> 
> I'm suggesting equivalent to plugging one of two 40's in as opposed to
> one 80 gig drive under fdisk.  If you unplug one and it has something 
> on it you protect that something.  Yes you can partition the 80 but 
> you see all the partitions and as far as I know you can't delete the
> first partition and redo it without dumping everything.

The last sentence is ambiguous. I don't know what "dumping everything"
means. I think you may be saying that if you delete the first
partition, you'll lose data in the other partitions. This is not
normally the case. Disk partitioning programs, like fdisk, don't
allow you to redefine new partitions that overlap other partitions.

Note also that repartitioning a hard disk does not alter the
data on the partitions. You'd have to write to the disk with other
programs to modify the contents of the partitions.


> It can be hard
> to tell which partitions you want seeing all of them from all of
> your systems at once.

I guess you want a comments field in the partition table.


> One change I'd like to see is allowing
> the primary partitions to each have their own extended chain so that
> it's easier under Ranish and other tools to tell what goes to what.

There's nothing stopping us from doing this now as far as the
partition table is concerned. All we need is cooperation from
the computer's BIOS and boot loader programs.

But this is solving the wrong problem. Extended partitions are
a band-aid to the limitation of four primary partitions. The
better solution is to extend the number of primary partitions.