Baslinux mailing list

[Ken Martwick <kenm AT efn.org>]

As an additional reference on HDD partitioning, the following is
the output of "fdisk -l" for my 10 Gig drive:

--------------------------snip--------------------------------

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1247 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1           262       626   2931862+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2           627       808   1461915   16  Hidden FAT16
/dev/hda3   *         1       261   2096451    6  FAT16
/dev/hda4           809      1247   3526267+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

--------------------------snip--------------------------------

In this case /dev/hda3 was created by DR-DOS v.7.01 on a then-bare
disc which previously had contained a lashed-up commercial GUI.
All additional partitions were created using Linux fdisk.  /dev/hda1
contains BasicLinux v.2.1, /dev/hda2 contains FreeDOS, and /dev/hda4
contains Slackware 8.1.  Since the currently-unused DOS partition
must be hidden (just to please DR-DOS, FreeDOS doesn't care), all
file transfers between partitions must be handled by Linux.  This
has worked flawlessly in all possible permutations.  In passing, it
should be noted that DR-DOS fdisk can only see the first 8 Gigs of
the HDD.
Ken Martwick