Get APLawrence.com by RSS(OLDER) <- More Stuff -> (NEWER) (NEWEST)
Home > Blogging > Blog # 941 Misunderstanding partitions and divisions
Printer Friendly Version
Misunderstanding partitions and divisions
Wed Jun 23 22:38:56 2004 Misunderstanding partitions and divisions
Posted by Tony Lawrence
Search Keys: fdisk divvy filesystem partition mkdev hd
Referencing:
<20040624092936.GH16829@sco.com>
While Linux systems (except for LVM) usually break hard drives up into multiple FDISK partitions, each of which will be a file system, SCO does it quite differently. Most SCO systems have one fdisk partition, and that is divided into up to 7 filesystems or raw divisions.
This difference can be confusing coming from either side, which might be part of the reason behind the difficulties this poster experienced. See http://aplawrence.com/Boot/filesystems.html also.
If this page was useful to you, please click to help others find it:
Your +1's can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.
Inexpensive and informative Apple related e-books:
Sharing Files in Panther (Leopard version also available)
Users & Accounts in Snow Leopard
Troubleshooting Your Mac
Take Control of iPhone and iPod touch Networking &Security, iOS 4 Edition
Apple Mail in Leopard
More Articles by Tony Lawrence - Find me on Google+
Have you tried Searching this site?
Unix/Linux/Mac OS X support by phone, email or on-site: Support Rates
This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more. We appreciate comments and article submissions.
Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.
Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.
We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.
Click here to add your comments
"Most SCO systems have one fdisk partition, and that is divided into up to 7 filesystems or raw partitions."
Not to be pedantic or anything, but did you mean "divisions" instead of "raw partitions?" Also, divisions are not necessarily filesystems -- for example, swap space is defined in a division (usually division 1).
My friends often accuse me of having a lot of "tedious minutae" in my head, especially when it comes to computers. Since that must be the case -- why else would I get ribbed about it on a regular basis? -- I'll offer up some PC hardware tedious minutae.
The PC hardware itself (i.e., the BIOS boot code) knows nothing about disk partitions. The only thing the BIOS code knows is how to load the master boot record (MBR) from physical sector zero of the boot drive and execute the machine code found therein. It is that code that knows about partitions. From this, one can (correctly) conclude that partitioning the boot disk is not a hardware requirement, a fact that is evident when one considers booting from a floppy disk, which has no partitioning.
Academically speaking, SCO's method of using a single partition containing multiple divisions -- some of which will be structured into filesystems -- is better than the Linux method of using disk partitions to delineate filesystems. The theory behind partitioning the disk is to support the use of more than one bootable operating system, not multiple filesystems. The way Linux does it is at odds with that theory. I personally think that Linux's use of partitions as filesystems is dumb and unnecessarily cumbersome. But, as we all know, opinions are like anuses: we all have one.
--BigDumbDinosaur
Yessir, I did mean "divisions" :-) and have corrected it.
I agree that the standard Linux filesystem on partition scheme is a bit dumb, but it is ameliorated somewhat by the ability to use extended partitions. And, as I noted, LVM does it "right" :-)
--TonyLawrence
It's just Linux showing off it's PC heratige. The BSD's (openBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD)follow the same format were you have a "c" partition that has everything and that's divided up between the different divisions like in SCO, I beleive.
--Drag
---January 14, 2005
LVM is much smarter..
Don't miss responses! Subscribe to Comments by RSS or by Email
Click here to add your comments
If you want a picture to show with your comment, go get a Gravatar