Location of partition table on disk

[John Gilmore]

In article <15583 at mordor.ARPA>, jdb at mordor.ARPA (John Bruner) writes:
> Sun's partition table on the disc is very convenient.  Unfortunately,
> their placement of it is not.  They put the disc label in the first
> sector on the volume.  This is OK if your machine's ROM knows about it,
> but if the hardware bootstrap wants to read block 0 (as the VAX does)
> it is a little inconvenient. :-)

This should be solvable by putting the partition table in the END
of block 0.  Presumably a short piece of code at the FRONT of block 0
can read in a few other blocks and jump to them.

Note that during bootstrap, you may not know how to find block N
(N > 1) since you won't know how many heads, sectors/track, etc exist.
That information is also in the Sun partition table.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore at lll-crg.arpa
		     May the Source be with you!