[Gllug] Win&Lin accessible filesystems

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 11:41:50AM -0000, Paul Brazier wrote:
> Is this a real open standard?
> Surely other OSs must have had the need for multiple partitions before
> MS thought of it?
> Is there an analogous extended partition that's purely linux/open
> source?
> So instead of having Linux in a DOS/Win extended partition you have
> Windows in a Linux extended partition?

Actually, this was never really answered.  The partition table is
more-or-less an open standard - it's not exactly freely published by its
inventors (IBM I guess), but it's a very simple format that is very well
known.  It's not an MS thing, but they were the ones to start using the
extended thing to allow more than four partitions.  Before that, four
partitions per drive was seen as enough for a PC.

There is actually a project called EPT which is attempting to create an open
(GPLed) Extended Partition Table which works in a different way but looks a
lot better than MS's way of doing the extended partition thing.
http://www.jmmv.f2s.com/ept/

I don't think you would be able to run windows on that drive though, since
I'm pretty sure it relies on the "standard" partition table format to locate
the partitions.

Pete
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