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    Yeah, you read the thread title right :smug:
    Impossible you say? Apparently not. According to diskmgmt.msc (this is a genuine screenshot):



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    Obviously, this is not how it's actually set up. It is impossible to have >4 primary partitions while using MBR.


    A little research turned up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_boot_record

    So my question is: do any of you guys/gals use EBR, or are you all content with MBR + extended partition?
    (Is anyone aware of any operating systems that support EBR? Probably some linux somewhere, but what about solaris and other server operating systems?)
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    (Original post by Chrosson)
    Yeah, you read the thread title right :smug:
    Impossible you say? Apparently not. According to diskmgmt.msc:



    Spoiler:
    Show
    Obviously, this is not how it's actually set up. It is impossible to have >4 primary partitions while using MBR.


    A little research turned up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_boot_record

    So my question is: do any of you guys/gals use EBR, or are you all content with MBR + extended partition?
    (Is anyone aware of any operating systems that support MBR? Probably some linux somewhere, but what about solaris and other server operating systems?)
    I stopped heavily partitioning my drives when I found that anything but the first partion experiance a significant lag on read times. It also had something to do with me paritioning a drive so much that it actually failed on me.
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    What makes you think that the drive failure was caused by excessive partitioning?
    A read is a read, no matter which logical chunk it's assigned to.

    If certain partitions are experiencing noticeably higher lags, there's usually a good reason for this (tends to be filesystem related), and more often than not, it's easy to fix such issues. I can't say that I've ever encountered such problems though, then again I don't think I've ever had more than 5 partitions per hard disk.
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    (Original post by Chrosson)
    (Is anyone aware of any operating systems that support MBR? Probably some linux somewhere, but what about solaris and other server operating systems?)
    Pretty much all operating systems on a standard pc support MBR and extended partitions. It's what MS-DOS used to do and it's what the bios in PC's can recognize.

    From memory Solaris on intel uses the MBR but then puts it's partitioning style inside a primary partition. Solaris on sparc does something totally different.

    Newer bioses and OS's use EFI instead of the original BIOS system to boot up. This can use a different format on Disk. This is what MacOS on intel usually does.
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    (Original post by mfaxford)
    Pretty much all operating systems on a standard pc support MBR and extended partitions. It's what MS-DOS used to do and it's what the bios in PC's can recognize.

    From memory Solaris on intel uses the MBR but then puts it's partitioning style inside a primary partition. Solaris on sparc does something totally different.

    Newer bioses and OS's use EFI instead of the original BIOS system to boot up. This can use a different format on Disk. This is what MacOS on intel usually does.
    FML, I meant
    (Is anyone aware of any operating systems that support EBR? Probably some linux somewhere, but what about solaris and other server operating systems?)
    I've edited my post.
    Yeah I know that MBR is pretty much ubiquitous Interesting about solaris though.

    Ah yes, efi supports guid partitioning, I remember now. Odd that windows support for it is limited though, considering the shortcomings of MBR.
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    (Original post by Chrosson)
    Ah yes, efi supports guid partitioning, I remember now. Odd that windows support for it is limited though, considering the shortcomings of MBR.
    I'm pretty sure that Windows 7 supports it and I suspect vista might do as well. I think the support that's mostly missing for EFI is at the bios level.

    I think the next generation of intel chips will only support EFI rather than the older bios system so we might start to see it take off a bit more.
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    (Original post by mfaxford)
    I'm pretty sure that Windows 7 supports it and I suspect vista might do as well. I think the support that's mostly missing for EFI is at the bios level.

    I think the next generation of intel chips will only support EFI rather than the older bios system so we might start to see it take off a bit more.
    Oh, sorry, I was talking about GUID partitioning.
    In fact (thinking about EFI now), why would it not work on XP (assuming limitations such as too large disk size are dealt with)? With BIOS the operating system is completely independent. If this is the same with EFI (?) then would it not work with any operating system?
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    It's been a while since I've looked at this in detail but I'm pretty sure the use of a partitioning scheme is dependent on the OS and bios supporting it.

    The OS side is fairly obvious. If the OS doesn't support a partitioning system then how can it find the data it needs from the disk.

    On a traditional bios the bios code is responsible for the initial setting up the hardware. This includes loading the first bits of the OS from the disk. To be able to do this the bios needs to be able to get at least some data from the disk so needs to understand how the partition table works. MBR is fairly simple in how it works. In the very early bioses this was required as the space for the bios was very small. It just needed enough code to be able to read the start of the disk.

    From a quick glace at the wikipedia page for EFI it looks like EFI is the replacement for the bios and it generally uses the GUID partitioning table. In EFI it can load additional modules from the disk (so needs to know about the partitioning scheme). I imagine EFI could use MBR as a partitioning scheme but with the limitations of MBR why would you use it if you can use GUID partitions.

    (Original post by Chrosson)
    Oh, sorry, I was talking about GUID partitioning.
    In fact (thinking about EFI now), why would it not work on XP (assuming limitations such as too large disk size are dealt with)? With BIOS the operating system is completely independent. If this is the same with EFI (?) then would it not work with any operating system?
    EDIT: I think I just realized what you're asking there.

    I'm pretty sure EFI as the bios replacment can work with XP but it needs to use MBR partitions it may also have to put some stuff in to make it look like a legacy bios. I'm pretty sure this is what bootcamp on and intel mac does.
 
 
 
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