<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div><br><span></span></div><div><span>Yes, I meant the "+". thanks.</span></div><div><br><span></span></div><div><span>and I suppose I picked on fdisk since as far as I know, grub</span></div><div><span>provides no user info except some kinda map. IF grub has</span></div><div><span>knowledge about the boots chain(s), perhaps a boot_chain_print() method</span></div><div><span>could be added.</span></div><div><span></span></div><div>I suppose my 10 partitions on my FC6 drive was still before fdisk was "fixed" ??<br>Unless the one Windows install on it screwed up the fdisk display.<br>( by adding "+" 's).<br><br>Way way way long ago, I had surmised that having a small "normal" partition<br>was the way for a boot to be easy. Of course Microsoft was perceived to<br>be owning the FAT technology at the time, so
I didn't think it could happen<br>until some court ruled FAT wasn't MS's anymore.<br><br>I've seen brief mention of uEFI once or twice.. as a bios replacement ?<br>Would like to see more about how it might work. Is it in "product" now ?<br>I mean, firmware has to start doing something at power-on no matter what<br>else is in the box. I guess having a ROM linux is the rage at some places.<br>But how different would a uEFI be ? Or did they just leave out leggy stuff ?<br> <br>W.........<br><br><br></div><div>Celebrating over 13,000 emails in my Yahoo Inbox !<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Bryan J Smith
<b.j.smith@ieee.org><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> Walt Smith <waltechmail@yahoo.com>; "calug@unknownlamer.org" <calug@unknownlamer.org><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Monday, June 20, 2011 1:25 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Disk alignment and boundaries -- WAS: Fedora upgrade<br></font><br>
Did you mean plus (+) instead of star (*)? The latter is used for active (not <br>required with Linux, or a non-Windows MBR).<br><br>The problem is that 63/255 sectors/heads is _non-aligned_. That's why one gets <br>the plus (+) at times. The problem is the legacy cylinder/heads/sectors (CHS) <br>geometry.<br><br>Newer fdisk versions in Linux distribution releases no longer use CHS, but raw <br>sectors -- be it 512b or 4KiB. This makes things easier to deal with, and get <br>perfect alignments. As I mentioned, I use 1GiB myself.<br><br>As far as boot chain, that has nothing to do with fdisk. Fdisk is not even <br>related to such. The boot chain is dynamic in GRUB, handled and generated at <br>boot-time. And Windows has an extremely dumb boot approach to complicate <br>matters in dual-boot.<br><br>uEFI could have solved it better than it did. But so far, it's just doing what <br>ARC did prior.
You have a FAT slice where you locate boot loaders. It is read <br>dynamically, but the rest of the boot is handled as before.<br><br>I will say one thing. At least with Linux, you can address boot issues. With <br>NT, you're f'd if it dorks up, which has been the case with some bare metal <br>Windows systems of ours on uEFI.<br><br>________________________________<br>From: Walt Smith <<a ymailto="mailto:waltechmail@yahoo.com" href="mailto:waltechmail@yahoo.com">waltechmail@yahoo.com</a>><br>Sent: Mon, June 20, 2011 10:32:06 AM<br><br>I've always been NOT happy with the little stars that show<br>in fdisk displaying partition sizes. (I'm not complaining about fdisk per se..<br>I think it was a good idea to display the info ). <br><br>Windows seems to want more precise<br>boundaries, or used to.. Haven't tried anything lately though.<br><br>But Bryans suggestion is a good one: and I would add/amplify:<br><br>There
should be a way to make ( create ) nice partition boundaries<br>to make the "star" go away ( rather than some user calculation on<br>a note pad ): either an option in fdisk or <br>a separate tool. (you'll notice I'm not detailing the meaning<br>of "star"). I never got it down quite perfect why other OS's<br>needed some boundary and others didn't. ... I believe there<br>was some discussion ( on another list ??)<br>regarding some defect in fdisk. I'm not sure there was a defect so much as<br>it's design was to simply make the part size exactly as the user told <br><br>it to. Although perhaps round-down was a problem if the size entered<br>was "mega-something byte" rather than 123 sectors... sector boundary ???<br><br>Also, fdisk allowed more than one partition to be marked "bootable".<br>I don't have an explanation for that. I'd like to see that fixed if<br>theres not a reason. Perhaps a marker
for each partition part of the boot chain <br><br>??<br><br>An fdisk display also does not show the boot chain.<br>There have been times when I'd simply forget what the boot sequence<br>was and have to trace it again.. I mean the path thru the partitions,<br>not the kernel boot vmlinuz.<br><br>If the boot is straight from MBR, there could be a simple text display<br>showing:<br>MBR => /dev/hda2<br><br>if the boot is chained, <br><br>MBR => /dev/hda1 => /dev/hda5 ( primary partition )<br><br>MBR= > /dev/hda4(LBA) => /dev/hda6 <br><br>( chain is on partition of LBA, where LBA is encapsulation for logical hda6,7,8 <br>)<br><br><br></div></div></blockquote></div></div></body></html>