Corp000085 Posted September 29, 2008 Share Posted September 29, 2008 For a friend's homework assignment... Is it possible to have multiple partitions on a floppy disk in either a windows or linux environment? I've been scanning google, but i may get an answer more quickly here... I haven't dealt with floppy disks in years, so i have no way to test anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Jack Posted September 29, 2008 Share Posted September 29, 2008 I remember there being a way to do it back in the DOS and early Windows days, but damn if I can't remember how. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcjeff215 Posted September 29, 2008 Share Posted September 29, 2008 For a friend's homework assignment... Is it possible to have multiple partitions on a floppy disk in either a windows or linux environment? I've been scanning google, but i may get an answer more quickly here... I haven't dealt with floppy disks in years, so i have no way to test anything. Here's a hint... where is the partition information stored on a hard disk? The REAL answer? Who the hell uses floppy disks? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcjeff215 Posted September 29, 2008 Share Posted September 29, 2008 Okay.. on Linux, it is possible to partition ANY block device (see below). The difference is that they boot different. The PC hardware isn't going to look for an MBR on a floppy device, it's just going to load a boot sector directly from LBA 0. A hard disk is going to look for a record and load from a bootable partition. It has to do with what's recognized by the system versus what you can actually write. Jeff jeff@martian:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=b dd if=/dev/zero of=b 172905+0 records in 172905+0 records out 88527360 bytes (89 MB) copied, 1.94793 s, 45.4 MB/s jeff@martian:~$ fdisk ./b Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x2291c037. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable. You must set cylinders. You can do this from the extra functions menu. Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite) Command (m for help): x Expert command (m for help): c Number of cylinders (1-1048576): 1024 Expert command (m for help): r Command (m for help): c DOS Compatibility flag is not set Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-1024, default 1): Using default value 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-1024, default 1024): 50 Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 25: Inappropriate ioctl for device. The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at the next reboot. Syncing disks. jeff@martian:~$ fdisk ./b You must set cylinders. You can do this from the extra functions menu. Command (m for help): p Disk ./b: 0 MB, 0 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x2291c037 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System ./b1 1 50 401624+ 83 Linux Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
/dev/null Posted September 29, 2008 Share Posted September 29, 2008 Do they still even make floppies? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corp000085 Posted September 29, 2008 Author Share Posted September 29, 2008 Do they still even make floppies? She's in some online IT class, and its a proof of concept type question, not a practical solution to a real problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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