Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!sdsu!crash!pnet01!jca
From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Large Disks
Message-ID: <482@crash.cts.com>
Date: 5 Oct 89 04:16:21 GMT
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 28

ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>At the Efficiency Beurs, I tried fdisk on some machines and it said the
>partition table was empty (all 0s).  Is that because all those disks had
>more than 4 heads, or do clones keep the partition table somewhere else
>these days?
 
 No, I had this problem with a fived headed drive.  It didn't give me all
 zeros, just a strange partition table.  You can fix fdisk by changing the 
 define macro NR_HEADS (or HEADS?) to the number appropriate for your drive
 and everything works.  Same thing for fsck.  The partition table is always
 in the same spot in the first sector of the disk.  Of course, as hard drives
 get large, the larger the partition table should be since it can accomodate
 more file systems and of course more operating systems.  Also, if one uses
 Disk Manager, it uses a 'modified' partitioning scheme to give you more than
 4 partitions which is the IBM de facto standard.  We could always adopt the
 BSD 4.2 file system and have partitions a through f with c being the whole
 logical drive if one desires an efficient file system.  :)

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