Location of partition table on disk

[Chris Torek]

In article <1073 at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> mangler at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
(System Mangler) writes:
>Putting the partition info in the inode is a great idea (no limit
>on the number of partitions) but the bootstrapping problems are real.
...
>Looks like we need a "partitions" block, someplace that won't get
>overwritten.  So where?  What sector number does Ultrix use?

Ultrix uses the last sector in the first superblock, or in other
words sector 31.  This turns out to be bad for a number of reasons;
the consensus for 4.4 appears to be to use block 0, and just hope
that no one ever needs more than $k$ bytes of boot code ($k$ is
currently 64, which seems rather small to me).
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
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