On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 5:38 AM, jasse...@itelefonica.com.br <jasse...@itelefonica.com.br> wrote: > Recently posted in this list: > >>(Alain Mouette) >>No it has never been illegal, and it always worked >>just fine. I use these since forever... what happened >>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. > >>(Liam Proven) >> 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. > >>(Alain Mouette) >>Not Lucky, just hard work. Partitions were invented >>without extended partitions, so it worked from the >>first... >>FYI: I started using PC-DOS 1.1... so I have a long >>history of dos and don'ts... > > I do not have as long experience as either of you, but > at least MSDOS 5.0 and PCDOS 6.3 (copies which I keep > now, in original floppies) look for just one DOS primary > and one DOS extended partition in each partition table. > If there are more than one, the others are ignored.
That is as I have observed, yes. > DRDOS and FreeDOS search all the partition table. Sounds about right. > AFAIK, DOS partitions were invented in MSDOS 3.3, to > work around the 32 MB disk size limit, and from the > beginning they had the primary/extended options. The history was this, as far as I know: MS-DOS 2, 1st version with hard disk support; 1 × FAT12 32MB partition MS-DOS 3.0, 1 × FAT16 primary + 1 × extended partition with 1 logical drive, 2 × 32MB partitions, total 64MB MS-DOS 3.3, 1 × FAT16 primary + 1 × extended partition with up to 23 logical drives, total of 24 × 32MB partitions, total 768MB Compaq MS-DOS 3.31, large FAT32 partitions with up to 32 sectors per cluster for partitions up to 2GB IBM PC-DOS 4.0 adopted the Compaq scheme and MS followed suit. (DR-DOS 3.4, the first version, was just before, and I think also used the Compaq scheme.) Windows 95 OSR2 introduced FAT32. > The > reason was that the number of sectors before a partition > was still limited to 64 Ki so the extended partition was > needed, in order to provide a new origin in the disk. This I did not know. > Anyway, this discussion is going astray from the > original problem of Marcos Favero, for FDISK should have > created the FAT 16 partitions he requested, whether or > not some DOS versions could find all of them. Thanks for the extra info! -- 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
