From: "Matthias Paul" <PAUL-MA AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Organization:  Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Date:          Wed, 15 Mar 2000 16:54:43 +0100
Subject:       FDISK (Was: Re: Dual boot DR DOS and Win95)
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22
Message-ID: <49CAB775312@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

On Tue, 14 Mar 2000 Charles Dye wrote:

[OEM label]
> >It is actually nothing more than switching back the OEM label 
> >xxxxxyyy to "IBM  3.3" instead of "DRDOS 7". Of course, you 
> >can do the same using DISKEDIT or DEBUG. This also fixes serious 
> >OS/2 problems to access DR-DOS partitions.
> 
> As I recall, there were actually two issues with FDISK:  it created
> clusters larger than needed (that is, too few clusters) plus the
> unrecognized OEM label.  Neither problem was terribly significant
> by itself; it was the interaction between the two that caused possibly
> disastrous problems under MS-DOS.
> 
> My guess is that a copy of FDISK patched in this fashion would avoid
> the worst incompatibility problems, but would still result in wasted
> space on small hard drives -- say, less than 128 megs.  And of course
> patching the OEM label on the drive itself won't fix the cluster size.

This is correct. However, it s not only the OEM label that I changed
in my personal issue of FDISK... ;-) Though it s not fully tested 
yet, the cluster size problem is gone too, and there are tons of
other more or less significant changes, that make the user interface 
a bit more modern and easier to use, make FDISK more reliable in 
some situations, and improve compatibility with other FDISKs as of
MS-DOS, PC DOS, OS/2, and even PTS/DOS. It is also more compatible 
with LOADER. Of course, there are also alot of new command line 
options. However, it s not yet finished, and it still does not yet 
support LBA by itself (I first want to finish all the other stuff, 
before I ll add this).

[Windows 2000 dynamic partition s ID]
BTW, I will not use Windows 2000 (for various reasons, including 
that it is not compatible with Boot Manager, and I don t want to 
give up OS/2, and also, because it contains the DISKEEPER software
developed by Executive Software, who are highly influenced by 
Scientology, and this is nothing I could ever trust on. 
Maybe especially as a German I will not accept any organization 
of any kind (even if they show up under the label of a church), 
that tries to control human mind and freedom of thought and 
speech... I don t want anyone to depend on them. This just had 
to be said.) 

However, regarding FDISK, does anyone know, if and under which
partition ID Microsoft hides their new "dynamic extended partitions"
as introduced with Windows 2000? I would like to at least let FDISK 
properly recognize partitions using this new partitioning scheme.

[Hidden Linux ext2fs ID]
On a different note, is anyone here using Powerquest s Boot Manager 
to hide Linux ext2fs partitions? The current issue of PARTINFO
contains a string "Hidden Linux ext2fs", but I wasn t yet able 
to find out, which partition ID they use for hidden Linux partitions.
Does anybody know?

Matthias