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

 MR> I might try testing this out on the drive I recently added to a system
 MR> for testing.  It should be a fairly simple matter to write an FDISK
 MR> to do this type of partitioning.

If you need any help, let me know.  It would be good for such a utility to
exist.

 MR> The test will be when I see if OS/2's FDISK chokes on the
 MR> newly-partitioned drive.

As long as you ensure that the CHS values match the sector offsets, then I
suspect that it won't.  I've used OS/2's FDISK on discs where changes to the
way that the geometry was faked have meant that partitions were no longer
cylinder aligned, and don't remember encountering any such problems.  I don't
think that FDISK cares whether or not the cylinder alignment rule is followed
by existing partitions.  I think that all that it does is ensure that the
partitions that it itself creates are aligned.

From this, I suspect that the designers of OS/2's FDISK (if we knew who they
were) probably couldn't tell us the reason for the existence of this rule,
either.  (-:

 ¯ JdeBP ®

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