[1158] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Re: Dos partitions, etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Aug 25 14:13:19 1997
To: Qian Z Wang <qzwang@MIT.EDU>
Cc: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 25 Aug 1997 14:07:33 EDT."
<199708251807.OAA27512@m12-182-8.MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 14:13:03 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Your master boot record's partition table has four slots for primary
partitions. Currently, it probably looks like:
Partition 1: primary DOS 1GB
Partition 2: Extended 1GB
Partition 3: (empty)
Partition 4: (empty)
The extended partition has its own four-entry partition table at the
beginning, which has partition entries for those logical DOS drives.
Your confusion probably stems from the fact that DOS only wants to
have one primary partition on a given disk. But you can still have up
to four primary partitions on a disk, as long as only one of them is a
DOS partition. (In fact, it works even if more than one is a DOS
partition, but it's not "spec" according to the DOS world-view.)
Anyway, the real question is where you want the NetBSD partition to go
physically on the disk. Presumably, your primary and extended
partition take up all the disk space, so you'll need to do something
like split your primary DOS partition in half or delete one of the
logical partitions and resize the extended partition.
(Please cc netbsd-help on any responses.)
