Re: (un)corrupted ext2 partitions

Brian Gerst (bgerst@quark.vpplus.com)
Thu, 14 Jan 1999 03:31:17 -0500

Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> One of the reasons why I don't like extended partitions is that they
> work essentially using a linked list scheme, where the first block in
> each extended partition is a partition table used to describe the rest
> of the partition. It's a very fragile data structure, and it's very
> easy to get corrupted. If you must use them, I'd strongly suggest
> having copies of "fdisk -l" and "fdisk -lu" safely stored away somewhere
> (say, taped inside the computer chasis) so you can recover if the
> partition table (or some part of it) gets smashed.

Is is time for somebody come up with our own (sub-)partitioning scheme
then? Something that is more robust and more flexible that DOS's aging
and broken scheme. Flexible meaning that it has a much larger limit on
the number of partitions without having to resort to "extended"
partitions (16, 32?), and uses logical sector numbers instead of whole
cylinders (relying on disk geometry is getting to be a pain in the
*ss). Such a scheme should be designed so that it could be used as a
subpartition from a DOS master partition table, but could also be the
master partition table. This would be useful for systems that are
linux-only. Redundancy of the partition table would also be a good
thing, like having an extra copy at the end of the disk. A project for
2.3.x?

I noticed that there is a "linux extended partition" type (0x85), but it
seems to only do the same thing as DOS extended partitions, except that
it is probably ignored by DOS/WIN.

-- 


						Brian Gerst


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