MIKE RUSKAI wrote to JONATHAN DE BOYNE POLLARD on 11-17-1999

MR> 
MR> of empty space at the beginning, and just a single logical drive
MR> defined. FDISK did it, not me.
MR> 
MR> What I find most silly in the above is that drive 2 is entirely
MR> invisible to DOS, because all of the partitions are beyond 1024
MR> cylinders. 

You will find that there is a 1 cylinder 'hole' on any drive with only
an extended partition.  Essentially, it stems from having the partition
table on the first cylinder and the convention of starting all
partitions (not logical drive, partitions) on a cylinder boundary. 
Since the extended partition can't use the first sector of the first
cylinder, it gets pushed to the second cylinder in order to start on
the desired boundary.  Waste of space, but that's what happens when you
cobble a kludge on top of a kludge to maintain legacy compatibility.

Will Honea 
--- Maximus/2 2.02