Subject: Re: partition sizes?
To: Alexander Langer <langer@cichlids.com>
From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
List: port-i386
Date: 08/19/1998 10:46:08
Alexander Langer <langer@cichlids.com> writes:

>Jonathan Stone schrieb:
>> Such "secondary" partitions aren't bootable (so you can't put NetBSD
>> in one) and they're often invisible to other OSes anyway.

>But I also cannot mount my DOS Partition which is in an extended.


Sorry, that's what i meant. DOS (now_ seems to deal with this
automagically.  But some other, non-DOS OSes dont jump through the
hoops to find 'extended' partitions. On these Oses, attempts to
automagically set up mappings for other OS'es partitions don't find
any of the `secondary' partitions.

*If* you manually set up a BSD disklabel entry for your extended DOS
partition, you will be able to mount it.  But the magic that fakes up
a BSD disklabel for unlabelled disks using MBR info doesn't know about
extended partitions, so it isn't looking there, and so it doesn't set
up a BSD disklabel entry for your secondary DOS partition.

This might be worth PR-ing.  Adding a teeny bit of recursion to the
existing code should handle it. But more importantly, it'd prevent
sysinst from thinking that "secondary" partitions are not used at all
(as it does now) and perhaps entrapping users into installing BSD on
top of their secondary partitions.

Perry?  Got any thoughts on this?