Partining was Re: multiboot OpenBSD

[James Hartley]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 3:16 AM, Tony Abernethy <tony at servacorp.com> wrote:
>  DOS/Windows has the screwball partitioning system.
>  The initial sector contains the initial boot sector which is used
>  to find the bootable partition and read the next sector of the bootstrap.

Not to quibble, but the IBM/Microsoft model MBR model anticipated the
need for multiple logical partitions & multibooting different OS'es.
Yes, it isn't like other architectures like Sun or Apple, but note
that Sun is a descendent of BSD & Apple mimicked Sun.  Some might
think that OpenFirmware/OpenBoot is odd, but all of this is simply a
question of semantics.

>  Main thing is to realize that the word partition is really two very
>  different words: DOS Partition (there are 4 primary partitions on disk)
>  and OBSD Partition (there are 16 stored on the disk)

The Sun & *BSD worlds used to call disklabel partitions "slices", but
the term has since faded.

>  1) I did NOT unstick myself  --- whatever I clobbered does not YET matter.
>
>  2) kinda obvious  the 'c' partition is how OpenBSD talks to the disk itself
>  (instead of just to an OpenBSD (as opposed to DOS) partition
>
>  It is possible that 'c' is required on some architectures and not on others.
>  In which case, you're ahead to keep from messing up something which cannot
>  be portable.

Traditionally, partition 'c' was meant to serve as a backdoor to
back-up software which could save all partitions at once.  One might
be able to function for quite some time without 'c', but I wouldn't
want to try it.  Working on a system that is in a questionable state
simply isn't my idea of a great date...

Jim