[Gllug] Win&Lin accessible filesystems

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 04:30:51PM -0000, Paul Brazier wrote:
> > Unix on PC hardware (pre-Linux) has traditionally used a single BIOS
> > partition, and subdivided that up using its own partitioning scheme
> > to get the required number of partitions. SCO and the BSDs do/did
> > this.
> 
> Is it possible to do this with Linux? All the Linuxes I've seen (not
> many admittedly) are on DOS primary/extended(logical) partions. Maybe
> this is because they often co-exist with Windows.
> But could a single-boot Linux machine do this in theory?
> 
> It wouldn't be too good for free-ness if Linux always required a DOS
> partition to begin with.

Having a "standard" partition table is not the same thing as requiring a DOS
partition. :)

Actually, I do have a box (an alpha) that can only boot to a DOS partition,
so I actually do require a small DOS partition to boot from and it loads linux
from there.

Maybe I shouldn't tell you that almost all linux boot floppies use the FAT12
filesystem, even including Debian's rescue.bin (I just checked).

Pete
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