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Ranish Partition Manager revived (Announce)

posted by fritz.mueller Homepage, Munich, Germany, 14.01.2023, 11:41
(edited by fritz.mueller on 14.01.2023, 12:11)

Hi,
first of all I wanted to let you know that fdisk behaves strange on virtual hds that are a little bigger than 2 tb, see:
https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/fdisk/-/issues/11
I would have expected that it says hd to big or no hd but that it works with the size bigger than 2 tb and creates this oversize as partition astonished me. i will try to find out what happens with 4 tb of size.
In the meantime I am able to create up to 7 smaller working partitions that behave like fdisk by using an extended partition and 4 logical volumes.
the trick is to enter the extended partition like in fdisk, save all this and with 2x enter you come into a new partition menu.
ranish shows a maximum size of 2 tb on the left top.
you will get more feedback later.

> Thank you Fritz for documenting your findings! It will take some time for
> me to work through it.
>
> Some general notes on using the software
> 1) Pressing "insert" only creates a partition of the type selected from the
> shown list. It does NOT format a partition.
>
> 2) Press "F" over a partition for formatting a FAT16 or FAT32 partition.
> The disk surface gets verified, therefore "verfying" is displayed. That
> takes a long time. You may skip verification by entering "/quick" as format
> argument.
>
> 3) Pressing "return" over a partition shows FILE SYSTEM information. If the
> partitions is not formatted that information contains GARBAGE.
>
> Large disk support
> Until now I only tested large disk support for disk up to 137GB, because my
> BIOS does not support larger disks. If using a 2TB disk or even larger
> there may be some edge cases that get triggered. I will setup a VM and try
> to reproduce your errors.
>
> The boot loaders are not patched for LBA access yet. That means, they are
> not able to boot from partitions starting beyond the 8.4GB barrier. The
> simple IPL gets installed by default when not using part.exe in advanced
> boot manager mode.
>
> Interface
> The inferface is "complicated" to say at least, and it would benefit from a
> complete overhaul. Sadly, I can not accomplish that in a reasonable
> timeframe. In the code, there is no clear distinction between interface and
> partition logic. Therefore a major overhaul of the interface would nearly
> result in a complete rewrite.
>
> But I will try to incorporate the "cosmetic" changes you mentioned.
>
> Questions
> 1) Have you tried to format the created 2TB partition with the operating
> system supplied format utility?

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