Re: partitioning and use thereof

On 10/7/21 11:41 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
> * The partition sector is the worst.
>    ONE sector is actually used, and (to exaggerate) ten thousands of 
> others get to be unused and unobtanium merely because they are on the 
> same cylinder.

Other things have been using the otherwise unused space in the sector 
for years.

Also, the standard / common sector sizes are either 512 bytes or 4096 bytes.

Different partitioning schemes may start on the next track or the next 
sector.  But there isn't a lot of space that goes unused.  By my rough 
math you're talking about wasting between 32 kB and 256 kB.  I feel like 
more space than that is wasted elsewhere in the disk / partition / file 
system.

> * Poor solution, i think.
>    More aggressive and allocation messy, is to (behind the scene) have 
> variable start location and variable file length.

Different file systems deal with the unused space in clusters in 
different ways.  Look beyond FAT and NTFS.

>    A no-byte-goes-unused scheme.

Anything that that gets high enough granularity to use all bytes is 
going to have performance penalties.

> * A complete DOS environment will live happily in a WIN folder.

Not really.

The last time I checked, no DOS kernel understands NTFS.  You need new 
enough versions of DOS to understand FAT-32.  So, you can store the 
files in a folder, but DOS won't be able to access, much less boot from, 
files in a folder on anything other than FAT.

> * The boot manager allows a copy of a configured OS to me in a 
> partition, avoiding need to re-install a bunch of programs.

Again, a boot manager doesn't avoid the need to install the programs. 
You still have to install them at least once, if not once per OS.

The days of sharing installed programs between different installations 
of Windows are long gone.  Windows 3.x was the last version that you 
could safely assume could share programs between installations.  Since 
then, there are considerably more files than just in the program's 
directories.  And let's not forget the program's entries in the registry.

>    That can save daze for a given OS.

No it can't.

>    But the eat-2-partition-per-os Micro$uck model decreases number of 
> OSes that can live on a drive.

I don't think it's two partitions per Windows.  I think you can have a 
shared UEFI (boot) partition plus one partition per Windows installation.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die