OSDev.org

I am currently working on partitions detection for the hard disks installed in the system. I have 2 questions, to begin with:

- Is it enough to copy the partition table in the MBR and keep track of the drive it belongs to, as an effective way of accessing the data in that drive?

- Does somebody has some actual information for the correct sequence to detect partitions from unused and standard ones, from nonstandard ones (i.e., secondary partitions/"virtual" drives, like ones of MS' Scandisk)?

I think it would be a little more efficient to stick the MBR data into a structure in your partition manager... but it is up to you how you do that.

I think that the correct way is to read the partition type id from the table and look it up in some sort of list. Then after that you hand that partition off to some sort of file system driver that verifies if that partition is really the type it says it is.

Here is a list of some of the partition ids:
http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/files/Pa ... nTypes.txt

You can look in Ralph Brown's interrupt listing for more.