I did some research for my new fdisk, and came up with the
following list. (By the way, additions and corrections are
welcome - many names are just meaningless labels for me
[what is Syrinx? what is LANstep? etc.], so I started
collecting short descriptions of the corresponding
systems or programs - I need more such descriptions,
and pointers to sources of information.)
Later I discovered osbs (a bootloader), and it had almost
the same list. Either this list is pretty complete or else
we used almost the same sources.
Id Name
0 Empty
1 DOS 12-bit FAT
2 XENIX /
3 XENIX /usr
4 DOS 16-bit FAT <32M
5 DOS Extended
6 DOS 16-bit FAT >=32M
DOS is a family of single-user operating systems for PCs.
86-DOS was a CP/M-like operating system written by Tim Paterson.
Microsoft bought it, renamed it to MS-DOS 1.0 and sold it to IBM to be
delivered together with the first IBM PCs (1981).
MS-DOS 2.0 (1983) was rather different, and designed to be somewhat
UNIX-like. It supported a hard disk (up to 32MB).
Version 3.3+ added support for disks up to 2GB.
Clones exist: DR-DOS, PC-DOS, ...
See comp.os.msdos.*.
7 OS/2 HPFS or QNX2 or Advanced UNIX
8 AIX data
9 AIX boot or Coherent
AIX is IBM's version of UNIX, designed to discourage its use.
a OS/2 Boot Manager
OS/2 is the operating system designed by Microsoft and IBM to be
the successor of MS-DOS. Dropped by Microsoft (and soon also by
IBM?).
10 OPUS
40 Venix 80286
41 Linux/MINIX (sharing disk with DRDOS)
42 Linux swap (sharing disk with DRDOS)
43 Linux native (sharing disk with DRDOS)
50 DM
Disk Manager is a program of OnTrack, to enable people to use
disks that are larger than about 500MB under DOS.
For info see http://www.ontrack.com.
Linux versions older than 1.3.14 do not coexist with DM.
51 DM6 Aux1 (or Novell)
52 CP/M or Microport SysV/AT
53 DM6 Aux3
54 DM6
55 EZD
EZ-Drive is another disk manager. Linux versions older than
1.3.29 do not coexist with EZD.
56 GB
61 SpeedStor
63 GNU HURD or Mach or Sys V/386 (such as ISC UNIX)
64 Novell Netware 286
65 Novell Netware 386
75 PC/IX
77 QNX4
78 QNX4 2nd part
79 QNX4 3rd part
QNX is a POSIX-certified, microkernel, distributed, fault-tolerant
OS for the 386 and up, including support for the 386EX in embedded
applications. For info see http://www.qnx.com/ or ftp.qnx.com.
See also comp.os.qnx.
Id 7 is outdated - QNX2 used 7, QNX4.x uses 77, and optionally
78 and 79 for additional QNX partitions on a single drive.
80 MINIX until 1.4a
81 MINIX since 1.4b, early Linux
Minix is a Unix-like operating system written by Andy Tanenbaum
and students at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, around 1989-1991.
It runs on PCs (8086 and up), MacIntosh, Atari, Amiga, Sparc.
Ref: Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Andrew S. Tanenbaum,
Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-637406-9
Since 950601 Minix is freely available - site: ftp.cs.vu.nl.
See also comp.os.minix.
82 Linux swap
83 Linux native
85 Linux extended partition
Linux is a Unix-like operating system written by Linus Torvalds
and many others on the internet since Fall 1991.
It runs on PCs (386 and up) and a variety of other hardware.
It is distributed under GPL.
Software can be found numerous places, like ftp.funet.fi,
sunsite.unc.edu and tsx-11.mit.edu.
See also comp.os.linux.*.
93 Amoeba
94 Amoeba BBT
Amoeba is a distributed operating system written by Andy Tanenbaum,
together with Frans Kaashoek, Sape Mullender, Robert van Renesse
and others since 1981.
It runs on PCs (386 and up), Sun3, Sparc, 68030.
It is free for universities for research/teaching purposes.
For information, see ftp.cs.vu.nl.
a5 BSD/386
386BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD
a7 NeXTSTEP 486
b7 BSDI fs
b8 BSDI swap
c7 Syrinx
db Concurrent CP/M or Concurrent DOS or CTOS
e1 DOS access or SpeedStor 12-bit FAT extended partition
e3 DOS R/O or SpeedStor
e4 SpeedStor 16-bit FAT extended partition
f1 SpeedStor
f2 DOS 3.3+ secondary
f4 SpeedStor
fe LANstep
ff BBT