Greg Lehey wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 November 2000 at 23:57:25 -0800, David O'Brien wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 02:53:04PM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
> >>
> >> If it shows valid partitions, you're using a Microsoft partition table.
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > Greg, can you read English?? Can you comprehend it?? Are you bind and
in
> > a write-only mode??
> > For the last time IT IS NOT A MICROSOFT PARTITION TABLE but a PC BIOS
> > PARTITION TABLE AND DICTATED BY THE INTEL x86 PLATFORM. THEY ARE ALSO
> > REQUIRED BY THE IA-64 PLATFORM.
> >
> > Why do you *insist* on calling it a "Microsoft partition table"??
>
> Hmm. I was going to say "Because it was introduced with Microsoft
> 2.0", but I'm no longer so sure. Reading the MS-DOS 2.11 source code,
> it seems that they didn't have a partition table at the time. Can
> anybody remember when it was introduced?
It was introduced with the IBM PC/XT, circa 1982. This would have coincided
with MS-DOS 2.0. You didn't find any mention of partition tables in the
MS-DOS 2.11 source because the only thing in DOS that deals with partition
tables is the fdisk utility. Disk I/O, formatting, booting, etc. is done
through the BIOS - the BIOS is where the important partition table code is
located.
If you want to be specific I guess you could call it an "IBM PC/XT partition
table".
Other stuff besides Microsoft OS's use the partition table. Just to name a
few: BeOS, Linux, QNX, Pick, System Commander.
Jim
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