On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 07:56:26PM -0400, benr@us.ibm.com wrote:
: >"portable"?
: >You are not referring to DOS-type partition tables, are you?
: >Nobody knows what they are.
: >DOS, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris and Linux each interpret
: >things in a slightly different way.
:
: Well, I don't know about Solaris, and I won't presume to speak for Linux,
: but DOS, Windoze, NT, and OS/2 all interpret partition tables in the same
: way. The format and structure of these partitions tables is well known (I
: wrote all of the disk partitioning code used in the OS/2 Logical Volume
: Management System. This code has been in use in-house for about 2 years,
: and has been in the field for over a year, and there have been no reported
: compatibility issues. I guess this means I got at least part of it right!
: ;) ).
Don't be too optimistic. Some years ago, when I tried to
install OS/2 Warp 3.0 on my 5 disk system that already had
Linux and FreeBSD, the OS/2 FDISK crashed and the install
failed. I found several bugs in this FDISK and tried to
contact some IBM person responsible for FDISK but failed.
So, if you do not get complaints it may just be that they
don't reach you.
About "in the same way" - of course roughly speaking they do,
but there are lots of tiny differences.
About "well known" - as far as I know, no documentation exists.
I would be very interested if you had a formal description
of DOS-type partition tables. On the other hand, you can
find my formal description at
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_tables.html
(but I have to warn you that I recently discovered another
small difference between Linux and DOS behaviour, so the
description given there is not 100% correct for DOS).
Comments are welcome.
Andries
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