Re: parted pre8 Apple_Void oddness

[Ethan Benson]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2000 at 09:24:53AM +1100, Andrew Clausen wrote:

> Hmmm.  Parted creates the Apple_Void partitions to fill in unused parts
> of the partition map, to preserve the partition numbers.  What should it
> do?  Is the current behaviour bad?  Does it anything choke?

but thats not what this one did, its not filling any unused blocks,
and its not preserving the partition numbers, on the contrary its
screwing them up!  i had to delete the root partition in order to
resize it to fill the space made by the shrunk bootstrap partition
(since you cannot resize the start of an ext2fs no?) i don't see what
this Apple_Void is doing other then wasting partition entries and
making the table discontinuous:

i have 3 partitions
i shrink partition 1
i delete and recreate partition 2 to fill space filled by shrinkage of 
partition 1.
now i have 4 partitions, one of which is completely and totally worthless.  

IMO Apple_Void partitions are dumb and shouldn't be bothered with.  i
think this is even what apple and others have done.  (well i suppose
apple has sidestepped the issue since you can't alter the partition
table with thier tools, only totally erase and start over...) 

given the limit of 15 partitions on scsi disks and the excessive waste
that the MacOS drivers create i really don't think we need more
useless partitions being created.   

as a sidenote i don't really like the way parted hides certain
partitions, hiding Apple_Free is dubiously a good idea but hiding this
bogus Apple_Void this is just annoying, you look at parted's output
see a missing partition and say `wtf?'

> Ooops.  Fixed.  I wonder how it managed to detect before, then...?
> (I was reading block 0, not block 2)

heh funny it detects ext2 ok... (both have a 2 block bootsector) 

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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