On Sat 03 Jun 2017 at 18:18:02 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote: > David Wright composed on 2017-06-01 18:55 (UTC-0500): > > > When I managed to persuade the Computing Service to issue me with > > several disks at the same time (very infrequently), I would make > > sure I created partitions with slightly different (usually by one > > cylinder, a historical concept!) absolute and relative sizes so that > > I could distinguish them in circumstances where size was the only > > parameter visible. > > Most of my / partitions are 4800M, 5600M or 7200M, to facilitate interchange > with minimal need to do any re-partitioning. I have bunches of multiboot test > systems, and do a lot of cloning. There's no way I could keep track of what I > have without a written record of what lives where. Luckily, the only > partitioner > ever used here[1] creates logs with tables that inventory each disk > wonderfully. > (Old) example: http://fm.no-ip.com/Tmp/Dfsee/fi965d03.txt
Yes, I've always kept an inventory of drives (and everything else) with the partitioning scheme, udev data, SMART output, and a general diary of anything unusual. But what I was talking about above is what's available to you at the moment you press the final confirmatory keystroke when, say, formatting a partition with DOS 6.22 or its predecessors. IIRC (20 years ago) at that moment, the only feedback from the system about which partition will actually be formatted is its size. And back in those days, if you formatted a DOS partition in linux, there was a good chance it wouldn't work because of disagreements over geometry. You had to let DOS choose the geometry and then linux would follow it. But you're unusual in working in this area, so unlike most of us you're going to have a dedicated tool available; in fact you work on it I see. Cheers, David.
