| See Partitioning 101 by
K9MkII (Bill) for descriptive information about what a partition table does for the OS,
where it is located, and why it is needed. See MS OS Partition Information for the rules
of usage determined by Microsoft.
Partition Types are pretty mundane information, but they may serve to inform that there
are a lot of people in the world who have some stake in how a partition table works. For
you to understand, you need to understand what they understand. Etcetera. The links I had
that pointed to partition table information have decayed. Else I would not have reproduced
this information for this site.
Lately, for instance, Microsoft is still using this basic partition table at boot time,
but only to point to its own proprietary data structures (mostly--basic vs. dynamic
disks).
Each partition table entry is 16 bytes. The information contained in those 16 bytes is
(more or less) dense considering the information provided. For CHS drives the start and
end location of a partition is stored and for LBS, the start and size in sectors is
stored. Also the partition type and the "active" partition flag is stored there.
Versions of FDISK that do not support large drives will incorrectly compute LBA values.
There is no standards/police body that determines who can use what codes for the
partition type. It's pretty much a free-for-all. The one byte type code indicates what
file system is using the partition. If your partition tool does not understand the file
system type for the partition, it may not be able to remove the partition entry.
Another reason, perhaps, to employ the debug routine described in "nuke and pave" to
remove a partition table.
How your partition tool interprets the type code depends on how your partition tool was
coded.
Typical type codes follow: |
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