AR>> I am curious as to why.  What advantage does that have over using
 AR>> Logical partitions?

 LP> You'll have to ask him.  if you really want to know I can give you his
 LP> email address. I knew. It has something to do about the weaknesses
 LP> inherent in logical partitions vs primarys. But I can't remember
 LP> right at the moment.

It seems that several people are asking "Why?".  Hand-editing the partition
table into a non-standard form using Norton Utilities isn't necessary at all
for the sort of setup that you appear to be wanting (DOS, OS/2, and possibly
DOS-Windows 9x on a single drive).

The standard configuration, which many people have been using for many years
(and which I have even used myself in the early 1990s), is to have: Boot
Manager, a single primary partition holding DOS, and OS/2 Warp in a logical
drive in an extended partition.  If one wants DOS-Windows 9x later, one
installs it on the single primary partition alongside DOS, since that is the
way that it will *try* to install itself, using the standard Microsoft
mechanism of playing musical chairs with the config files on that partition
once one has booted from it.

The one "weakness" of logical drives that most people worry about is that
their drive letters can alter if one adds extra discs with primary partitions
on them.  *However*, it is actually very unusual to need to have a secondary
or tertiary disc with a primary partition on it.  One won't be able to boot
such a primary partition *without* Boot Manager, since the BIOS only boots
from the first physical disc.  And if one *were* using Boot Manager, it
wouldn't need to be a primary partition *anyway*, since Boot Manager can quite 
happily boot extended partitions.  The consequence of this is that secondary
and tertiary physical discs don't need to contain *any* primary partitions,
and *all* partitions can be logical drives on such discs.  As such, the worry
about drive letters of extended partitions on the first physical disc changing 
when one installs another physical disc is removed, since it is only *primary* 
partitions on such discs that affect the order of drive letter assignments for 
logical drives on the first physical disc.  Logical drives on secondary and
tertiary physical discs will not affect the drive letter that is assigned to
logical drives on the primary physical disc.

What other "weaknesses" did he have in mind ?

 ¯ JdeBP ®

--- FleetStreet 1.22 NR
114/477
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