Re: misbehaving partitions

[Don Mulvey]

>I don't understand what you mean by "freespace".

Yea you do ... unallocated space on the drive.  I call it "freespace".

>Yep.  In libparted I don't store ANYTHING about EBRs.  Parted only
>remembers where the primary, logical and extended partitions are.
>Everything else is regenerated/recomputed each time.  This hasn't
>caused any problems.

My motivation was so I could map the entire drive. The ebr(s) take up a
track of space so I use an ebr metadata segment as a placeholder.  It
actually is easier to just throw them away though.

>I think trying to preserve the old structure will be a nightmare.
>What happens if you delete or add new partitions, for example?
>(i.e. need to modify the structure in some way)

I rechain the logicals after deletes and


>Also, I am aware of a problem of changing this policy (to making it
>in-order).  Imagine the following setup, from good-old-fdisk:

>   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
>   /dev/hdb1            14       127    915705    5  Extended
>   /dev/hdb5            39        64    208845   83  Linux

>Nr AF  Hd Sec  Cyl  Hd Sec  Cyl    Start     Size ID
> 1 00   0   1   13 254  63  126   208845  1831410 05
> 5 00   0   1   38 254  63   63   401625   417690 83


>Notice how partition 5 starts on head 0, not head 1?  It doesn't
>have it's own partition table... the only EBR is at the start of the
>extended partition itself.  The first logical partition (i.e. the
>logical partition in the EBR of the extended partition) never has
>it's own partition table, and always starts on head 0 in this way.

>If you wanted to "insert" a logical partition before (geographically),
>you would normally make this /dev/hdb6, and it would have it's own
>EBR.  i.e. the extended EBR would point to an EBR in front of /dev/hdb6,
>and that latter EBR would contain the entry for /dev/hdb6.

>There is no way of making /dev/hdb5 /dev/hdb6, because this would
>require giving /dev/hdb5 it's own partition table, but there is no
>room for one.

Now you just had to go and do that didnt you.  Geeeeez what a messy
picture.


>BTW: what's the "default" seg mgr?  Does it mean "MS partition tables"?

The current engine segment manager will eventually be the os2 segment
manager so that it can maintain the os2 dlat tables and work with the os2
region manager to export os2 volumes.   The default segment manager should
manage msdos tables ... libparted?

-Don