[OT] Partition table documentation pointer

[Mike A. Harris]

Hello all,

In the past I've had to do some manual hard drive reconstruction
with Norton Diskedit, debugfs, and various other utilities,
however I could never find adequate documentation for the
partition tables and detailed disk layout.

I have asked in the past, and got some help, but mainly the
answer was look at "genhd.c" in the kernel source.  Well this did
help, it was certainly far from real documentation.

I just stumbled across full and complete documentation of
everything imagineable about the PC's partition tables, disk
translation, you name it.

Where?

GRUB source code.  ;o)  I decided to download the bootloaders dir
from sunsite the other day to see what state the various loaders
were in compared to LILO, etc..

I found that GRUB comes with extensive documentation for how hard
disk CHS/LBA disk translation and other translations work
including screwy BIOS's, Ontrack disk mangler, and anything else
you could imagine.  Extended partition tables are explained, ad
infinitum..

So...  I thought that I would pass this info along since nobody
seemed to know of its existence when last I asked about it.

Anyone working on LILO, or any other bootloader, or anything to
do with hard disk translation or reading/writing partition
tables, or repairing screwed up drives, HAS GOT TO GET THIS!

The documents are very much what I had hoped for long ago!

I hope this info is useful to someone out there, perhaps someone
writing an open-source bootloader similar to System Commander.
;o)

You can get the grub source code from:

ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/boot

or something like that...

Take care!

TTYL


--
Mike A. Harris                                     Linux advocate     
Computer Consultant                                  GNU advocate  
Capslock Consulting                          Open Source advocate

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