Some senseless babbling from Jonathan De Boyne Pollard to Mike Ruskai
on 11-29-99  08:41 about fdisk /query...

 JDBP>> What mechanism *would* you have to assign drive letters, then ?
 
 MR> I'd be inclined to go with physical definition order.  

 JDBP> You mean to simply enumerate all volumes on a single drive before
 JDBP> proceeding to the next one ?

Yes.
 
 MR> But my primary concern when writing the above was to criticize the 
 MR> practice of assigning letters to primary partitions on separate 
 MR> physical drives before assigning letters to any logical drives in 
 MR> extended partitions.

 JDBP> One can understand why it is this way, of course.  Choosing to
 JDBP> enumerate all primary partitions first made MS-DOS 3.3 backwards
 JDBP> compatible with MS-DOS 3.2 . 

Backwards compatible?  3.3 is when the extended partition came into being,
right?  If so, then backwards compatibility isn't the issue, since that was
broken by adding the extended partition.  The only thing guaranteed is that
the limited number of partitions that 3.2 sees will be in the same order as
in 3.3.

DOS 3.2 wouldn't be able to see a single partition on my system, so I
couldn't care less about ordering my drives in the same manner it did.

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... Cool, I like explosions.

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