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Date:      Wed, 2 Sep 1998 18:56:50 -0700
From:      Scott Blachowicz <sab@seanet.com>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, Scott Blachowicz <sab@seanet.com>, Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
Cc:        Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: MSDOS extended partitions and "slices"
Message-ID:  <19980902185650.A6944@dniquote.com>
In-Reply-To: <199809030146.TAA03143@lariat.lariat.org>; from Brett Glass on Wed, Sep 02, 1998 at 07:43:37PM -0600
References:  <199808021131.FAA12204@lariat.lariat.org> <199808080608.AAA16222@lariat.lariat.org> <199809021901.MAA21131@two.sabami.seaslug.org> <199809022113.PAA00535@lariat.lariat.org> <19980902175652.A11500@emsphone.com> <199809030005.SAA02250@lariat.lariat.org> <19980902172833.A3976@dniquote.com> <199809030043.SAA02590@lariat.lariat.org> <19980902183643.A5424@dniquote.com> <199809030146.TAA03143@lariat.lariat.org>

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> >But, so does the current scheme (or what am I missing here?). Anything that
> >corresponds to a DOS drive gets a slice number. 
> 
> Yes, but this is misleading, because a DOS drive isn't always a slice! It's
> often a smaller section within a slice. That's why it's called a "logical"
> DOS drive.

OK...I meant that anything that would get a DOS drive letter (if it were
formatted for DOS) gets a slice number.

> >I thought the current scheme would always have the 2nd logical DOS drive in
> >the extended DOS partition as /dev/wd0s6. Slices 1 thru 4 are defined as
> >the primary partition slices, slice 5 is the first logical, slice 6 is the
> >second logical, etc...
> 
> Not necessarily. What if there's no primary slice 4? (Answer: everything
> rolls down a number.)

I didn't think it worked that way - I thought the primary partition table (or
whatever it's called) always had 4 slots in it.  And FreeBSD slices 1-4 were
always allocated to those slots.  And the 1st logical drive always got slice
number 5.

> >then you turn slice 2 into an extended partition keeping slice 3 as an
> >extended partition, then you have trouble because you can't predict the slice
> >numbers that get assigned to the logical drive inside slice 3.  
> 
> That's right. This is one of the problems. The names should reflect the
> hierarchical structure, and the names of the logical drives should NOT be
> affected by what's in the other slices.

Does that mean it's possible to have more than one extended partitions?  If
so, then I agree that the current scheme can lead to the slice number
uncertainty you describe.  If you can only have one extended partition, then I
think everything is predictable.

-- 
Scott Blachowicz
sab@seanet.com

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