re-write is this booting info correct?

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:24:40 +0800, Fbsd1 <fbsd1 at a1poweruser.com> wrote:
> I have the win98 fdisk english version. I tested this and the fdisk 
> program displays just the drive letter with out the :. Now on the DOS 
> command line you do have to use the : to change to different drive, like 
> in to change to A: drive.

Yes, the fdisk program acts that way. Adding ":" after the
drive letter (as a capital letter) is a thing you usually
see in any documentation, like "this erases you C: drive"
or "check floppy in A: and B: to make sure they are present".



> The correct word as displayed in the fdisk program is 'logical dos 
> drives' just the way i have it.

Okay, then "Laufwerk" and "drive" are corresponding correctly.
Then it's a "logical drive inside an extended DOS partition".
I will remember this, thanks for checking!



> back in win3.1 days a 20MG hard drive was the largest made at the time.

I'm _sure_ it was a 20MB hard disk, maybe just a typo? :-)



And for the rewrite:

> The Microsoft/Windows fdisk program is used to allocate partitions on 
> the hard drive. This program allocated two types of partitions “primary 
> dos partition” and “extended dos partition”. DOS means “disk operating 
> system” which was the precursor to the Microsoft/Windows desktop GUI 
> “graphical user interface” first appearing in Win 3.1.

You should have DOS in caps always, as in "primary DOS partition".



> An alternate method is to allocate an “extended 
> dos partition” and then sub-divide it into logical dos drives lettered 
> C, D, E, F.

And it is possible to have a bootable system without a primary
DOS partition? I hardly can imagine that - but don't bet on
my opinion, I've NEVER used any "Windows", so I'm honestly
just guessing.

A typical "multi-drive" setting would contain a primary DOS
partition C:, and an extended DOS partition containing the
logical drives D:, E: and F: (for your 4-drive example).



> The FreeBSD ‘disk label’ program is used to sub-divide the slice into 
> smaller chunks called partitions.

The program's name is "disklabel" or "bsdlabel" respectively.



> This hard drive 512-byte MBR is where all the limitations are. Due to 
> its size the MBR partition table is limited to 4 entries. This means no 
> matter how large your hard drive is (20MG or 200GB) you can only 
> sub-divide it into a maximum 4 slices/partitions.

I'm sure you wanted to say 20MB - megaBytes. :-)



> The FreeBSD fdisk program has option to 
> write a simple boot menu program to the MBR. Its called the "FreeBSD 
> boot manager".

The program "boot0cfg" does this.





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...