Re: [Linux-NTFS-Dev] Windows Dynamic Disks, Parted

[Andrew Clausen]

On Sun, Sep 05, 2004 at 06:52:58AM +0100, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> > Can you give a practical example of this?
> 
> Made up example:  "I just ran fdisk in Linux and now Windows doesn't 
> boot.  Help."

In this case, you'd probably want a tool to grab the contents of the
WDD, and generate a partition table for it?

> > >     - user wants to edit non-dynamic disk partition entries (I've thought
> > >       it was impossible mixing windows dynamic partitons and basic 
> > >       partitons but I've seen them working together)
> 
> Yes, this is possible.  I have seen it in action.

Just a guess: if the 0x42 partitions leave some free space, you can do
what you like with the free space?

> > >     - perhaps other scenarios
> > 
> > Shouldn't all of this stuff be provided by a Windows Dynamic Disk program
> > rather than Parted?  Therefore, shouldn't Parted always refuse to touch
> > it?
> 
> Perhaps.  OTOH parted could become such a program.  There is no LDM editor 
> under Linux yet (mostly due to lack of requests for it).

libparted doesn't really have the infrastructure to do lvm-style stuff.
It would be nice, but I doubt it will happen soon.  I'm accepting
patches...

> > The counter-argument is that the Windows Dynamic Disk program might
> > want to use libparted to handle the partition table stuff.  Is this
> > likely?  This is rather hypothetical though, since the linux-ntfs
> > projects' LDM program is still rather immature (is that right?).
> 
> Well it only does "fdisk -l" equivalent for LDM and does no editing.  But 
> it is fully stable doing that.  (-:

Well, this could be useful for fixing hosed partition tables (see above).
Probably best to do this as a different frontend to libparted, and not
include it in Parted itself.

But, there haven't been any requests...

> > In any case, I don't have access to Windows XP Professional, and I
> > can't test this stuff out myself.  I am comfortable with doing the
> > following things immediately:
> > 
> >  * option 1: simply refuse to touch them.
> > 
> >  * option 2: make a new partition table type called dynamic-disk,
> >  and make it read-only.  (It would share the disk_dos.c code).
> >  
> >  * option 3: make a new partition table type called dynamic-disk,
> >  and make it only permit modification of non-0x42 partitions.
> 
> This is probably the best one.  Perhaps add a further restriction:  Do not 
> allow to add partitions to a dynamic disk.  They would conflict with the 
> LDM anyways...

Would they?  My guess is that the Dynamic Disk partitions just reserve
the space inside them, rather than the whole disk?

Do you have time to do some experiments?

Cheers,
Andrew