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Ranish Partition Manager revived (Announce)

posted by bretjohn Homepage E-mail, Rio Rancho, NM, 21.11.2022, 01:59

> I think it is a good idea to make the LBA view the default when operating
> on disk >8GB but I want to leave the user the option to switch back to CHS
> view.
You can do that, but of course when they see a disk >8GB in CHS mode it will just look like it's 8GB. I personally think the default view should be LBA and CHS should just be for "informational" purposes (but things should appear red when the numbers don't agree).

I discovered as I have been writing by USBDRIVE program that you really can't trust much of anything a disk tells you, particularly when comparing LBA to the various CHS values (MBR, PBR/VBR, GPT, BPB, ...). You will find the same entries for various places even on the same disk don't agree with each other. I've even found some USB disks that don't report the correct LBA value. That is, one of the parameters that is returned by the low-level functions is the Maximum LBA which should always be an odd number since the total number of sectors should always be even and LBA numbering starts at zero. Some disks actually return the total number of sectors (which is the Maximum LBA + 1) which must be adjusted.

I have also been doing a little bit of testing with Ranish to see what the MBRs provided by various VMs look like and see a lot of red (inconsistent/invalid) values showing up. Also, sometimes VMs provide MBR disks and other times provide PBR/VBR ("superfloppy") disks which makes thing even more troublesome. I have some routines in USBDRIVE that try to detect whether something is an MBR or a PBR/VBR and operate accordingly.

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