Re: parted pre8 Apple_Void oddness

[Andrew Clausen]

Ethan Benson wrote:
> 
> 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.

I can't reproduce this behaviour.

> 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...)

So, how should I avoid them?  pdisk renumbers partitions in this situation
(bad!)
 
> 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.

They are place-holders.  If you create a new partition, it will use that
number.  It is simply there to preserve the partition numbers after it
(which should be under 15, anyway)
 
> 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?'

Why?  I don't understand what your saying - Apple_Void isn't a partition.
It's an empty partition map entry.  For example, with DOS disk labels,
you can have partition 1 and 3, but no partition 2 and 4.

I can change this behaviour, but I think preserving numbers is good for
/etc/fstab

Andrew Clausen