Accessing partitions in drive images

[michael miller]

The number of columns on a hollerith card.  Why are there 80 columns on
a hollerith card?

Mike

On Sun, 2012-01-29 at 15:38 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > I've always wondered: why do the little USB flash sticks,
> > SD cards, etc. all include a partition-table with one
> > partition? Why don't they just use whole-device filesystems?
> 
>   Because they're not floppy disks, and fixed disks are assumed to
> have a partition table.
> 
>   The design of the IBM-PC (I use the term "design" loosely) assumes
> two types of disks: Floppy disks and fixed disks.  Floppy disks are
> generally assumed to be of the few well-known types.  Fixed disks can
> vary and one is expected to inquire as to the size.  Flash drives
> wouldn't work as floppies, so they're treated as fixed disks.
> 
>   There's nothing insurmountable that keeps one from just putting a
> filesystem on a USB flash drive.  Indeed, you can do it, and Linux
> software will generally be just fine.  But it breaks a lot of
> assumptions that could screw up BIOSes and other OSes, and/or lead to
> those same things trying to write a partition table into your
> filesystem.  And since your flash drive is technically laid out in a
> non-standard manner (again, I use the term "standard" loosely), it
> would arguably not be their fault.
> 
>   Next up: Why are console windows traditionally 80 columns wide?
> 
> -- Ben
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