Some senseless babbling from Jonathan De Boyne Pollard to Mike Ruskai
on 11-20-99  13:39 about Multiple visible primary...

 MR> Recall Linda Proulx's posting of her FDISK /QUERY output, from booting
 MR> with floppy disks on a system which doesn't have OS/2 installed yet.
 MR>
 MR> All of the primary partitions were seen and assigned drive letters, in
 MR> order.

 JDBP> By *FDISK*, yes.  But what FDISK displays doesn't necessarily match
 JDBP> what OS/2 *does*.  After all, FDISK will display the drive letter
 JDBP> assignments as they would be after changes have been made but before
 JDBP> they have been saved to disc.  Obviously FDISK isn't querying the
 JDBP> operating system for the drive letter assignments, because it has to
 JDBP> cope with the case where the current state of the partition table in
 JDBP> memory doesn't actually match the current state of the partition table
 JDBP> on disc. 

So in effect, if she were to type "D:" during this boot (from which she ran
FDISK /QUERY), she'd get a SYS0015.

Which brings us back to the point where Linda's quest is thoroughly doomed,
instead of partially.

[later]

While adding an old drive to one of my machines for the purposes of setting
up a bunch of HPFS partitions to test my HPFS programs, I decided to first
create four primary partitions, and change the partition types to 0x06.

I then booted from OS/2 floppies, and the first one in the partition table
(which FDISK strangely made the last partition on the drive, in terms of
sector offset - they were all ordered that way) was the only one assigned a
letter.

Curiously, when I ran FDISK /QUERY, it did not contradict the assignment of
drive letters.  It gave no letter to any but the first partition table
entry, even though all were type 0x06.

So, it would seem that the FDISK in Warp 4 is quite different from that in
Warp 3 (which Linda was using).  I seem to recall a bug or two in FDISK
back in my Warp 3 days which was corrected by a fixpack.  Perhaps its take
on drive lettering was altered at the same time.

[snip rest]

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... I'm not always right. Only 99.938742% of the time.

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