What kind of partition table does OF expect? Using regular x86 partitioning, 'ls hd' fails to see any partitions...

Amiga partition table will always work best.

I've installed Debian with msdos partition table type.
Do you know if its possible to change the partition table type without altering the partitions ?

No, that will destroy your everything on your HDD.

It shouldn't... unless the partition table uses more space than DOS's...

Can anybody give me a link where the Amiga partition table is briefly described.

I googled for it but I didn't find anyting useful. Perhaps I enterd the wrong keyword.

I found somting about partition table formats in the the fdisk manpage but only about BSD/SUN, IRIX/SGI and DOS disklabel but nothing about Amiga.
As it seems to me fdisk is the wrong programm for Amigas partition tables. Parted seems better.

Thanks

afaik, OF reads amiga's ffs, ext2, fat, fat32, i heard somewhere, it also reads amiga's sfs... i use ext2, and it works flawlessly.

bye, MarK.

You should only use Parted on Pegasos/EFIKA.

At the moment there is a DOS patition table on the harddrive in my efika. The debian installer patitioning tool (parted I think it was) created it or used the one install by the hd supplier.

Now I am considering switching, because I am not happy with the partitioning I did.
So I wanted to now somthing about the amiga partiotion table, like how many partition it supports and if there is somthing like 'Do not start a partition that actually uses its first sector (like a swap partition) at cylinder 0, since that will destroy the disklabel' (BSD/SUN).

Amiga RigidDiskBlock partitioning is basically a linked list of partitions where the only quirk is they are 'cylinder aligned'.

http://www.kernel-api.org/docs/online/2 ... ource.html

The Linux support source code explains it pretty easily. The "RDSK" identifier is searched for on disk within the first few sectors of the disk. It needn't be at sector 0.

Each 32-bit value in the structure that looks like a block location on disk actually is. rdb_PartitionList is the block number of the first partition block ("PART").

The partition block links the next partition block (pb_Next). You can label partitions independantly of the filesystem (pb_DriveName) and even link a filesystem binary for AmigaOS/MorphOS to the partition and save this inside the disk structure so it will always mount. I wish Linux had this feature!

You can have as many partitions as you can fit on the disk up to the RDB_ALLOCATION_LIMIT blocks - this is 16 in that include, so that's about 150+ partitions, within reason :)

GNU parted properly handles the format. There are no quirks like special partition types (primary or extended or logical) but due to the nature of parted (PC-originated) it does ask you what type the partition needs to be, and that should be 'primary'.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Thanks!

With your discription and with looking a the linux kernel soureces I have a clue how it's working.