Re: Dual Booting Windows XP

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From: I'm Dan (dgREMOVE-THIS1261_at_cs.com)
Date: 04/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 04:49:00 -0700

"Jim" <null@null.com> wrote:
> ...(snipped)...
> The reason people use logical partitions for OSs is precisely
> because they don't have a feature like unlimited primaries.
> They exhaust their primaries, and then have to resort to the
> extended partition to "stretch" the multi-boot capabilities
> of the system. But by using unlimited primaries, you can
> now leave your *data* to the extended partition, as it was
> intended to be.

I'll agree that limited primaries may compel users to put OS's in logical
partitions, but there's really no harm in doing so. You may have a phobia
about putting OS's in logical partitions, but XOSL makes it very easy to
manage them. Linux can run in logical partitions, so why can't Windows?
Well, they can. It's just Microsoft's lame MBR and installer routines that
can't put them there natively, but if you can get them there, they have no
problem running from there and XOSL is one of the few boot managers that can
manage them from there.

And using BING's "unlimited primaries" feature ignores one very glaring
danger -- it's proprietary, meaning only BING knows where those other
primaries are. The dormant partitions (the OS's you're not booted into)
show up to all "normal" utilities, including XP's Disk Management, as
*unallocated* space. It would not be hard to imagine someone trying to use
XP's Disk Management, diskpart, Partition Magic, Partition Commander, fdisk,
or any of a multitude of other utilities and accidentally blowing away your
carefully hidden partitions because the utilities didn't know anything was
there. If you opt to use unlimited primaries, it's crucial that you
restrict yourself to BING and not use other partition management utilities.

BING's "unlimited primaries" is a powerful feature, but the price of
incompatibility with normal disk utilities is high. If BING loses track of
your partitions, you could be in for a heap of grief because no other tools
will work. And don't think that can't happen. As an example, BING uses the
"officially unused" sectors on track 0 (sectors 2-63) for itself. But in a
brazen move a year ago, Intuit TurboTax secretly began using those same
sectors to store their own version of "product activation" data. The effect
was it broke BING, as well as any other boot manager that was designed to
use those sectors. (Admirably, XOSL wasn't designed to use those sectors.)
In a PR fiasco, Intuit had to quickly backpedal and disable their activation
scheme, but it showed that it can happen.

I'm not a BING basher -- I like the program and am a registered user. But
if you're going to champion its "unlimited primaries", it's important to
also be aware of the downside of enabling that feature. And BTW, it should
be pointed out to the OP that BING is not free. It is indeed well-priced,
but the distinction should have been pointed out to the OP earlier.

> By using the extended partition for OSs, you introduce
> several complexities, the worst being the possibility of
> drive letter assignments changing underneath you as you
> manipulate your partitions.

That's simply not true. Drive letter assignments are defined by the DiskID
(a 4-byte code in the MBR) and the starting sector location of the partition
in question, irrespective of whether it's a primary partition or logical
partition. Drive letters are no more prone to changing just because it's a
logical partition.

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