Hard disk partitioning on PCs is one of those confusing areas, full ofpeculiar features and apparently random limitations, especially thewhole primary partitions versus extended partitions thing.

Fortunately, it's actually fairly simple:

• primary partitions are just a fixed size array in the firstsector (the master boot record, among other things).
• extended partitions are a chain (a linked list).

Each extended partition starts with a sector (the ' extended masterboot record ')that describes how big it is and then points to

I recently used ' help() ' on one of my own internal modules, mostly asa quick way to browse the entire function/class collection in one go.Now, I'm kind of a slacker when it comes to using docstrings (for somereason I prefer comments before the function), so I didn't expect tosee very much in the help() output.

Much to my surprise I saw things like:

hostFromEnv(env)  # Extract the host from the  # REQUEST_URI

While the Berkeley FFS and derivatives like Solaris UFS are much, muchbetter at dealing with fragmentation than the original V7 filesystem(which continued on into System V before SysVR4), they can actually getfragmented over time to a degree that matters.

Traditional Unix, Solaris included, really doesn't have any tools fordefragmenting filesystems; instead, you get to to do it the bruteforce way, by copying everything into a clear filesystem. With SolarisDisksuite and mirrored disks, it is possible to do this