Mail Archives: opendos/2001/11/30/08:04:47
That is correct. The old DOS standard only allowed one FAT primary
partition, the newer DOSes which you are using all give you the behaviour
you want - but that's only because they chose to implement it that way. It
would have been perfectly valid for the programmers of those DOSes to decide
that all other primary partitions will be ignored, which is what the old
versions of DOS used to do. This is why FDISK only allows you to create one
primary DOS partition.
Anyway this discussion is probably irrelevant in the case of the Joe's
question, as it seemed he was intending to partition for non-DOS OSes.
Joydeep
>From: dlistwoodall AT home DOT com
>Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
>To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
>Subject: RE: Extended partitions (was: FDISK)
>Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 01:37:57 -0500
>
>In <F98v2CkpbB7akhHndkp00009357 AT hotmail DOT com>, on 11/30/01
> at 03:05 PM, "Joydeep Mitra" <jolly_joydeep AT hotmail DOT com> said:
>
> >If your question is whether you can have "logical drives" of different
> >OSes within your Extended partition, the answer is yes. Nothing will get
> > "confused" as the type of the partition is defined in the table that
> >corresponds to the logical drive.
>
> >Also you can have more than one primary partition - but there must be
> >only 1 DOS Primary partition. So you can have a NTFS primary partition,
> >a Linux primary partition, a DOS primary partition and an Extended
> >Partition. The Partition Table in the MBR can have up to 4 entries. Any
> >primary partition can be made Active or bootable put Extended partitions
> >cannot.
>
> >I think thats enough waffling for the moment :)
>
> >Joydeep
>
>Joydeep
>
> A person can have more than one DOS primary partition on a hard
>drive.
>
> I've done it.
>
> Drive C: Primary 125MB's Caldera's DR-DOS 7.03
> Drive C: Primary 125MB's FreeDOS
> Drive C: Primary 125MB's MS-DOS 6.22
> Drive C: Primary 125MB's IBM's PC DOS 7
>
> They are not all "Drive C:" all the time. Which ever one you are
>booted to is `Drive C:.'
>
> The drive letters D, E, and F float amongst the non-booted
>partitions.
>
> Of course, this was on my special purpose DOS/Floppy
>machine.
>
> I was using the FreeDOS "Fdisk" program to do this. It
>includes an extremely fundamental boot manager to help choose which
>partition to boot from.
>
> There is an unresolved problem at the moment, which is
>that the FreeDOS `Format' program has a bug in it which tends to trash
>things making this difficult to do.
>
> I am waiting for the bug fix so I can try it again an if it can more
>easily be done.
>
> FYI
>
>
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