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

 JdBP>> What mechanism *would* you have to assign drive letters, then ?

 PK> How about the method used by unix? 

Given that UNIX doesn't *have* drive letters, I can see that this idea is
going to be an interesting one.  (-:

 PK> The boot partition is the Root, [...]
 PK> To maintain compatibilty with drive letter dead S/W, the boot
 PK> partition becomes C: and no other letters are assigned [...] at all [...]
 PK> partitions/drives at all (CD's, etc, are also mounted under the
 PK> Root). Then the "issue" over the visibility and ordering of
 PK> primary/logical partitions goes away completely...

Actually, no it doesn't go away.  It is just renamed in the hope that everyone 
will overlook it.  (Amazingly, this actually seems to happen.  (-:)  What on
"PC style" operating systems is an issue of drive letter assignment order is,
on PC unices, an issue of the assignment order of device numbers.  One still
has pretty much the same problems on PC unices of having to shuffle things
about (such as the contents of one's fstab file or the names in one's /dev
directory) if one adds or deletes partitions as one has on "PC style"
operating systems with drive letters.  One still has to change things.  One
simply has to change *different* things.

Indeed, this is in fact made *more* complicated on unices than on "PC style"
operating systems because one has to have *additional* mechanisms to enable
the partition number for the root volume to be overridden in the case that the 
re-partitioning happens to have altered it.  This is because it is compiled
into the kernel.  At least "PC style" operating systems (or, at least, those
PC style operating systems such as OS/2 Warp where the operating system can
reside on something *other* than the first primary partition) automatically
work out which volume is the boot volume and which drive letter is thus the
boot drive letter.

( Actually, there's no reason that unix boot loaders cannot do the same as "PC 
style" operating systems do here and have the boot loader automatically work
out the correct device number for the root volume and pass it to the kernel. 
I suspect that the reason that they do not is a blind refusal on the part of
unix devotees to take a good idea from "peecee operating systems" despite it
being a good idea, more than anything else. )

 ¯ JdeBP ®

--- FleetStreet 1.22 NR
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