Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 01:06:20 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: Riccardo Torrini <riccardo@torrini.org>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Nate Lawson <nate@root.org>, Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> Subject: Re: Trivial patch: fdisk doesn't recognize my partitions Message-ID: <3DEB228C.146CD58C@mindspring.com> References: <XFMail.20021202080637.riccardo@torrini.org> <p05200f26ba10b7cdec2f@[128.113.24.47]>
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Garance A Drosihn wrote: > The thread is not necessarily a waste of time, but it sounded > like some people might want freebsd to *do* something with that > information, instead of just displaying it. That is a > particularly scary idea to me right now, as I have a system > with a whole bunch of freebsd installs on it, and I do hide > some of those freebsd partitions from other freebsd installs. > > I am sure I am overly-sensitive to that particular idea. Me too (obviously ;^)). > This still sounds a little too definitive to me, as if we are > absolutely sure what that partition is. I think that's where > some of the debate came from. I (for one) wouldn't be quite so > jumpy about the idea, if we changed it to: I personally would still be jumpy. 0x1C is a partition type I remember well from an OS that is no longer shipping, and I don't really see where the "magic.com" program derives its authority for redefining it as a disabled partition of an existing type, unless they have a letter from God and John Postel... > For a user who doesn't understand why some partition > just "disappeared", it could be a bad idea if fdisk tells that > user the partition is "hidden", and thus the user blindly changes > the partition id to "un-hide" it, when they never hid it in the > first place. That's the part I'm gunshy about, particularly if > we were to follow the suggestion made earlier in this thread, > that we just turn off x'10' from an unrecognized ID and see if > that matched some recognized ID. And giving that impression is decidedly evil... Toggling that bit will change a NeXTStep partition (0xA7) into a BSD/OS 3.x partition (0xB7). It will change a MacOS-X partition (0xA8) into a BSD/OS 3.x swap partition. It will change a Be, Inc. BFS partition (0xEB) into a VMWare filesystem partition (0xFB). It will change a Xenix root partition (0x02) into a Compaq config partition (0x12). It will change a Minix partition (0x41) into an a Novell Netware NWFS partition (0x51). And are we all *positive* that the 0x10 bit was the only thing that was changes on the disk, in order to "disable" the partition? Or was the secondary bootstrap or other files in the partition itself modified? Not worth taking the chance, IMO. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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