Vista Enterprise and partitions
03 March 2008, 10:21 PM
#1
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Vista Enterprise and partitions
Been playing with Vista (spit), and noticed that when performing a bog-standard installation using the Enterprise DVD and creating just a single partition - that partition actually starts 2MB into the disk and seems to be given an actual size smaller than the space allocated to the partition itself (of that makes sense)!!!
It is almost as it Vista is reserving some space at the start of the disk for something (bitlocker boot, secret NSA spyware
).
Anyone seen this or know why it happens?
Cheers,
mb
It is almost as it Vista is reserving some space at the start of the disk for something (bitlocker boot, secret NSA spyware
).Anyone seen this or know why it happens?
Cheers,
mb
03 March 2008, 11:24 PM
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...but surely the (Vista) MBR would be inside the (1st) partition, not before it.
There is only a single entry in the partition table for the disk (1st primary and active partition). If Vista is using space outside of the partition, then it is extremely bad practice as some other application could legitimately create a partition in the (unused) space.
I'll see if i can find out more tomorrow.
Cheers,
mb
There is only a single entry in the partition table for the disk (1st primary and active partition). If Vista is using space outside of the partition, then it is extremely bad practice as some other application could legitimately create a partition in the (unused) space.
I'll see if i can find out more tomorrow.
Cheers,
mb
04 March 2008, 12:40 AM
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I think people have had problems with Grub & the like, but that was only on a quick google 
If that happens you usually have to use bcedit to repair
Maybe the 2Mb partition is for bootloaders, as OS2 used to use
If that happens you usually have to use bcedit to repair
Maybe the 2Mb partition is for bootloaders, as OS2 used to use
05 March 2008, 12:13 PM
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Well to answer my own question - it is because Vista is getting ready for super-large drives which use large sectors. The first partition starts after 1MB (when i said 2MB i was mis-reading the 2048 sectors), and the explanation can be found at Windows Vista support for large-sector hard disk drives...
mb
Originally Posted by Microsoft says
The file system, the volume manager, and other parts of the storage stack in Windows Vista have been updated to accommodate hard disk drives that have a large sector size. In earlier versions of Windows, the default starting offset for the first partition on a hard disk drive was sector 0x3F. Because this starting offset was an odd number, it could cause performance issues on large-sector drives because of misalignment between the partition and the physical sectors. In Windows Vista, the default starting offset will generally be sector 0x800. However, the starting offset might be different for drives that have special alignments. For emulation drives that have special alignments, dynamic disk operations will not be supported in the initial release version of Windows Vista. This support will be added in a future service pack.
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