Paul: You really need to do some more research on this before making suggestions. As Tom indicated, you should go ahead and try to do it to see what kinds of issues you will run into. Trust me, there's a lot of things you aren't taking into account (including many that Eric mentions).
> ... And so, it seems to me that there is not much reason to create > MBR partition tables today. Not true at all. Even a GPT-formatted disk is REQUIRED to have an MBR in sector 0 (called a Protective MBR). Some manufacturers also implement a hybrid scheme which has both MBR and GPT records pointing at the same partitions. This is a really bad idea (and defies the purpose of using GPT in the first place), but bad ideas are often implemented anyway. > If FreeDOS was to define a GUID for itself, GRUB probing could in > the future detect a FreeDOS installation and add it to the menu. That would be a REALLY bad idea. There is currently a "standard" GUID associated with "Microsoft Basic Data", which covers pretty much everything MS has anything to do with (the various FATs, including exFAT, NTFS, and others). That already covers everything FreeDOS would ever need. A new GUID would make things worse instead of better. To figure out what kind of formatting is actually in the partition, you must look at the partition data itself -- what's in the GPT is not enough to tell you like it is with MBR. For example, from the GPT alone you can't tell whether a partition is FAT12 or NTFS and FreeDOS can't boot from NTFS. It would certainly be possible to boot FreeDOS from GPT, but it is not trivial. Adding GPT functionality to something like FDISK would even be more ugly. You'd probably be better off trying to port something from Linux or, as others have suggested, just do the partitioning in Windows or Linux and leave DOS out of it. When I partitioned one of my USB drives with GPT so I could do some testing I used a Linux utility that had been ported to Windows. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
