On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:36 PM, Alain Mouette <ala...@pobox.com> wrote: > > Em 20-05-2010 01:28, jasse...@itelefonica.com.br escreveu: >> Liam Proven<lpro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Don't try to create 3 primary partitions - in DOS >>> terms, that is an illegal layout. >> >> Interestingly, illegal in MSDOS and PCDOS, but >> both FreeDOS and DRDOS accept this layout (I tested). >> Anyway, shouldn't FDISK make the right layout >> when requested to create multiple partitions? > > No it has never been ilegal, and it allways worked just fine. I use > these since forever... what happend is that most tools did not have a > way of making them, but if you know how to make them it allways worked > since MSDOS-3.
You have been lucky. I have seen many incorrectly-partitioned systems with multiple primaries where some drives were not visible, on various versions of MS-DOS and up to Windows 95. It's not a good idea; unpredictable things can happen, such as writing to the wrong "C" drive and causing corruption. > The rules of letter attibuting are very strange: > 1) the first (sometives the active) partition of each drive > 2) all extended partitions from each drive at a time. There were issues > as to sequences in recurrent extended partitions. > 3) all remaining primary partitions of each drive. Wrong way round. It is: - enumerate all primaries, drive by physical drive - then enumerate all logical drives on each physical drive, stepping through the drives as each is exhausted It is logical but confusing. Win7 no longer does this at all - the boot drive is always C; if there was an existing DOS-level C, it seems to disappear. > This is why I suggest > There is one restriction: most RD-DOS versions can only boot from the > first partition, which should of course be primary and active. This is > just a bug. It's normal behaviour, across multiple versions, so I'm not sure it counts as a bug. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
