Some senseless babbling from Will Honea to Mike Ruskai
on 11-18-99  00:43 about fdisk /query...

 WH> 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. 

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

I figured something along those lines.  It's not noticeable on another
drive with only an extended partition, because there's no translation, and
one cylinder is only 1008 sectors (too small for FDISK to report it as free
space).

Now, if we could kill the convention of assigning letters to primary
partitions first, things could be a lot easier.

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... I've tasted love and I want more.

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