From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Aug 10 16:36:30 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA19541 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Mon, 10 Aug 1998 16:36:30 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from resnet.uoregon.edu (resnet.uoregon.edu [128.223.144.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA19532 for ; Mon, 10 Aug 1998 16:36:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by resnet.uoregon.edu (8.8.5/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA12588; Mon, 10 Aug 1998 16:35:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 16:35:57 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White To: Brett Glass cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MSDOS extended partitions and "slices" In-Reply-To: <199808080608.AAA16222@lariat.lariat.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 7 Aug 1998, Brett Glass wrote: > >This is fully normal. Extended partitions get mapped to extra slice > >numbers since one extended partition can have multiple logical disks. > >wd1s2 is the extended partition itself, which isn't that useful. > > But.... Waitaminnit. If you have an extended DOS partition with some > number of logical DOS drives within it, you should REALLY see: > > C: wd1s1 > Extended DOS partition: wd1s2 > D: wd1s2a > E: wd1s2b > F: wd1s2c > Third partition (FreeBSD, Linux, whatever): wd1s3 > Fourth partition: wd1s4 > > This would be consistent with the actual structure. The logical DOS drives > lie WITHIN the extended partition, which is one of the four possible > partitions, or slices. It's a decent argument, but: 1. There is a maximum of 8 partitions that can be defined this way (a-h). 2. The B partition is only used for swap. 3. Letters C and D are reserved for the slice partition and the whole-disk partition in BSD parlance, respectively. 4. I bet I'd get people trying to disklabel an extended MSDOS partition. So in the end it's confusing to the end user. Arguably the extra-slice system is confusing, but us old UNIX hats won't try anything silly on a DOS partition. :) One of the great things about open source OS's is that if you don't like it, rewrite it. ;-) Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message