JP>>  ...  It's certainly *not* how one would design a hard disc 
 JP>> partitioning scheme if one were designing it from scratch (rather than
 JP>> trying to retrofit something decent on top of the old "four
 JP>> partitions" scheme and retain backwards compatibility).

Of course, one doesn't need to redesign the partition table in order to
recover this wasted space.  One simply needs to drop the requirement that
partitions be aligned to whole tracks.  I am not aware of the reason for this
particular rule.  There's certainly nothing in the partition table structures
themselves that require this.  Nor indeed can there be there anything
requiring this in operating systems that use the logical sector number and
offset fields in the partition table.  OS/2 Warp is one such operating system, 
and it isn't bothered if partitions aren't track aligned, for example.  I
suspect that the only operating system that would be bothered by non-aligned
partitions, if indeed any operating system *were* to be bothered at all, would 
be DOS.

There are at least two advantages to having sector-aligned partitions rather
than track-aligned partitions that would be of especial benefit in my view:

        þ The partition containing Boot Manager would only occupy a couple of
KiB, since that is all of the space that Boot Manager *actually* needs.  The
rest of the space in the Boot Manager partition, on current systems, is simply 
wasted.  This would stop newbies complaining about how Boot Manager "takes up
a whole 8MeB on my drive, whereas my old multiboot utility only took a few
KiB!".

        þ There would be no space for MBR viruses to hide in.

Maybe it's time for us to step boldly into the 1990s and drop this rule.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

--- FleetStreet 1.22 NR
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