Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 8 Feb 1998 23:11:35 +0100 | From | Martin von Loewis <> | Subject | Re: extended paritions are evil. |
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> Well if I add support for BSD-style extended paritons > then hda2 gets expanded into hda{5,6,7,8} > and extended parition on hda4 becomes hda{9,10,11,12}
Yes, that's the way it is now. If you repartition your disk, drive numbers change.
> This all seems be kind of nuance, and even worse > it remind me old days of horros with M$ stuff where > you had A:,B:,C:,D:,E:,F: and so on and whey would all > change their place if you did modify system slightly.
I don't see this as a problem. As soon as you decide to use the BSD partitioning support, just make sure it is always enabled. This is the same as enabling the hard disk driver, or the file system: If you forget to enable essential code, you will not be able to boot.
There is a small transitional problem, and this is when you reboot for the first time. You have to use the root= command line option, and to fix /etc/fstab. Fortunately, Linux will not swap to the wrong device - the swapon command will simply fail.
Once you've fixed /etc/fstab, everything will work again. This is unlike DOS, where renumbering drives would require fixes in many distributed configuration files.
> One of solutions I could think of was of idea of sub-slices > Ie, instead of hda{5,6,7,8} for extended parition of hda2 > or hda4 use hda2{a,b,c,d} for extended parition of > hda2 and hda4{a,b,c,d} for extended parition of hda4
The problem is that you assign device numbers in the kernel, not in /dev. Also, the partitioning is done by kernel code.
Someone suggested that devfs might be able to solve this. I believe it currently doesn't.
I'm also not aware of any PC OS that can handle this.
Regards, Martin - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
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