Re: 701C dead in the water after partition table edits

["John H. Kim" <jokim@tuna.mit.edu>]

On Tue, 23 Apr 1996, Robert Dewar wrote:

> "No, that's not true. You can have as many primary partitions on the disk
> you want. (Take an example: if you instaled OS/2 using a FAT filesystem
> ..."
> That is not the usual way to instll OS/2 in a boot manager setup. OS/2 is
> happy to boot from a non-primary partition. If you used two primary
> partitions, then  don't see how DOS would see the OS/2 files, since DOS,
> as faar as I now, allows only one primary partition.

You can have up to four partitions on a disk.  Four primary, or three
primary and an extended.

DOS fdisk allows only one primary partition.  OS/2 fdisk allows up to
four but does it in a way that only one is active (and thus visible)
at a time.  OS/2 Boot Manager, in addition to picking which partition
to boot off of, will change the partition table entry for unused
primary partitions from FAT to type 11 (unknown) to make them
invisible.

Linux fdisk allows multiple primary FAT partitions that are visible
at the same time.  However, since two members of this list have had
their hard drives become unusable shortly after doing this on their
TP701s, I recommend you not try it.
--
John H. Kim          "Just try telling the IRS you don't feel like
jokim@mit.edu        'contributing' this year come April." -- Bob Dole
jokim@tuna.mit.edu   on Bill Clinton's avoidance of the word 'taxes'