[OT] Partition table documentation pointer

[Guest section DW]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 07:41:02AM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:

> 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..

In case you are referring to the Hale Landis' "How It Works" documents,
yes, these are useful, although outdated and not entirely correct;
I do not think Hale ever described logical partitions correctly.

Maybe you never saw
	http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_tables.html
	http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types.html
	http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk.html
?

On the other hand, if you are not referring to the "How It Works"
documents, then probably I would be interested to see if there is
anything useful there that is not in any of the three URLs given above.

Andries


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