MBR management

MBR management

[Vladimir Serbinenko]

Hello. I'm back after long time of inactivity. I would like to expose my 
idea:
Many of commercial OS have some weird conditions on where they are 
installed (e.g. it must be installed on primary active partiotion, ...)
and what we can do is
1st possibility: function that transform primary<-> logical like:
logical->primary: hang it simply at MBR
inverse: create a extended table and hang it on this table (operation is 
only possible if there is some place before the partition but it's 
always the case with partitions transformed from logical)
2nd possibility. Add grub extended partition table (e.g. on last sector 
of first track) containing "hidden" partitions that can be transformed 
in primary and inverse
Pros: primary partition is on the cylinder boundary (does any OS really 
depend on this?) and extended partition contains no primary partition 
within it (is it really important)
Cons: "empty" space can be emdommaged by partition tools but we can add 
this partition support to parted
3rd possibility 1st+2nd
I made some proof of concept coding with grub1 (it was some time ago) 
but one problem is that grub numbers partitions depending on its logical 
state (so theese operations would change numbering). Possible solutions 
that I see
1) change partition numbering so that it numbers them in physical order
1a) keep both numbering (e.g. (hd0,0) and (hd0,p0))
2) partition labels
3) save original partition numbering
4) keep the things like they are and let the scripts handle theese 
situations
5) Your porposals?

Yours, phcoder