After running out of primary partitions, I made partition 1 of my Efika hard drive into an extended partition which now holds (?) 3 logical partitions and some unallocated space. All these logical partitions are mountable from within linux. However, SmartFirmware sees things differently -

ok ls hd
DOS partition 0: extended (0x5)
DOS partition 0: linux (0x83)
DOS partition 1: extended (0x5)
DOS partition 0: linux (0x83)
DOS partition 1: extended (0x5)
DOS partition 1: linux (0x83)
DOS partition 2: linux (0x83)
DOS partition 3: linux-swap (0x82)
ok _

Notice the third logical partition isn't listed. What's more, in order to view the directory structure of the 2nd logical partition, I have to enter:

ls hd:0,1,0

Whereas to view the 1st logical partition, I only have to enter:

ls hd:0,0

What are the numbers after hd:0, describing? And why can't SF access all of my logical partitions?

Because handling extended/logical partitions is a bit broken.

_________________
Matt Sealey

i have also a lot partitions (8). the first ist primary and with ext2... but when i try "ls hd:0" i see nothing, also when i try "ls hd" so atm i put the kernel on a usb stick, but this is not the final solution... the hardisk was runing in a x86 pc with same partitons well... any ideas?

Wait until we fix it, unfortunately.

_________________
Matt Sealey

I have on my hdd - 1 primary and 1 extended partitions. Extended partition still more some partitions. All partitions formated with ext3fs.

I type - ls hd
DOS partition 0: linux (0x83)
DOS partition 1: extended (0x5)

When I type - ls hd:0 - I see contents of primary partition.

Now I type - ls hd:1 - I see nothing.
Very strange.

As a result I cannot load OpenSuse 10.3 which is on the one of partition in extended, I put loader to my usb flash and boot from it - works good.
Any comments?

The firmware doesn't handle extended partitions properly, so.. this is expected.

Simply don't use extended partitions. Do you really need more than 4 partitions on a disk?

_________________
Matt Sealey

I would like to use more than 4 partitons...

use lvm, a much better approach.

Why not use Amiga partition tables, then? Is there some big reason to use PC MBR?

_________________
Matt Sealey

the best reason i can think of is that it's easier that way to prepare the disk on a x86 pc.

That's a good point but it seems everyone in this thread has no trouble partitioning using a Linux installer, they just can't boot from the resultant partitions if they're 'logical' rather than 'primary'.

What would be great is if we could support more partitioning formats like GPT (from the EFI standard as used on high end Itanium, AMD64 and Intel Apple boxes) - of course this is a nod to the other firmware standards, but it's far more commonly used than Amiga partitioning, and just as flexible (up to 128 partitions, backup partition table, checksums for partition data, supporting partition names, marking partitions with their supported filesystem or purpose, plus basing around LBA rather than weirdo CHS block numbering), while staying compatible with MBR partitioning.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Parted (and libparted) supports all kind of partition tables independently from the architecture it runs on, AFAIK. So, if you do the partitioning from the command line, it doesn't really matter. You can do it on a Linux/x86 just like you'd do it from your Linux/PPC. It's true though that most GUI installers/partitioners not really support RDB. Sometimes not even on PowerPC. But if this is not a problem, everyone with bPlan hardware should do himself a favour, and use RDB. :)