From: dlistwoodall AT home DOT com
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 01:37:57 -0500
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <F98v2CkpbB7akhHndkp00009357@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: Extended partitions (was: FDISK)
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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