Issues with the Partition Table & MBR pages [UPDATE]

[eekee]

The Partition Table page has a couple of serious issues. It's named as if all the world is a BIOS PC, and it proposes a modification to MBR which distracts from the reference material. (As an LBA newbie, I found the latter confusing until I realised I could just ignore it.)

The MBR page is named appropriately, but has a number of topics. (It's huge.) Its information on the MBR partition table format is a little confused, perhaps overly terse, and is split into 2 top-level sections for some reason.

EDIT: New proposal below
I propose to...

• Improve the MBR page's coverage of the partition table using material from the Partition Table page and perhaps some new material
• Perhaps move the 48-bit LBA proposal to a new page, or perhaps just discard it -- opinions please
• Delete all content from the Partition Table page, replacing it with a disambiguation list linking to MBR, GPT, and optionally other partition types.

I'd like to hear opinions on all these.

The MBR page improvements are non-destructive, so I'll go ahead with those later.

For completeness, there's one more issue which I can't think how to deal with and I'm not sure needs fixing. The MBR page is named "MBR (x86)" when it applies to IDE disks in PPC Macs and very likely others. This likely goes back to the 90s; when IDE drives first gained the capability to inform the BIOS of their size and C/H/S layout, many would fail if they didn't have an MBR partition table. Perhaps this should just be written as a note at the top of the page.

Oh wait... considering that last point and the sheer size of the MBR page, perhaps MBR Partition Table should be a new page. It's really only the partition table which applies to those other systems. I'll go ahead with improvements within the MBR page; this info can be moved to a new page later.

[Octocontrabass]

Improve the MBR page's coverage of the partition table using material from the Partition Table page and perhaps some new material

Sounds good to me.

Perhaps move the 48-bit LBA proposal to a new page, or perhaps just discard it -- opinions please

Discard it. As far as I can tell, no OS actually implements that extension - anyone who needs more than 32-bit LBA uses GPT instead.

Delete all content from the Partition Table page, replacing it with a disambiguation list linking to MBR, GPT, and optionally other partition types.

I recommend including at least enough information to guide the reader to the correct pages. Just listing them might make them all appear equally important, when in reality most people will only need to worry about MBR and GPT.

[eekee]

Delete all content from the Partition Table page, replacing it with a disambiguation list linking to MBR, GPT, and optionally other partition types.

I recommend including at least enough information to guide the reader to the correct pages. Just listing them might make them all appear equally important, when in reality most people will only need to worry about MBR and GPT.

Yeah, I was going to divide it into sections, with the top section containing only MBR & GPT.

I spent today coding instead of writing. Oh well.

[eekee]

The more I look at the MBR page, the less I think changes would make sense. It's a good set of instructions for writing a MBR-based bootloader, and I don't want to spoil that. Also, the page's full name makes perfect sense in this context: "MBR (x86)" because it's about writing a bootloader for x86 PCs and not, say, PPC Macs or 68k Atari STs, both of which use MBR partition tables.

New proposal:

• Remove only the partition table section from MBR (x86) -- it gives the idea there is partition table info to be found there, but there's very little.
• [DONE] Remove the 48-bit proposal from the Partition Table page
• Request a rename for the Partition Table page to MBR Partition Table
• Create Partition Table as a disambiguation page following the comments above

Comments will be appreciated.

EDIT: The 48-bit section formerly had the following note:

'''Note: This appears to be [[User:Bewing]]'s own invention and probably isn't implemented anywhere. Someone investigate this, please.'''

Someone helpfully replaced this with a simple {{disputed}} . I'm looking at this because I'm thinking of copying the section to its author's talk page when deleting it. That seems like the polite thing to do.
EDIT #2: bewing last visited this forum 4 years ago, and was last active years before that. Not much chance of asking about it. I'll just dump it on his user talk page.
EDIT #3: 48-bit proposal removed and places on bewing's talk page.