Monday, July 23, 2012

Tales from the crypt - Cross linked partition tables

Back in 1999 I happened to own a DX4 100 ( That's a clock tripled 486 processor) based system. I ran a dual boot with Windows 98 and Redhat Linux 6.1 on a small 2 GB hard drive.

The system had 32 MB of RAM and I used about 100 MB of page file for Windows on a separate partition. A huge annoyance was the fact that I needed to also allocate precious space for Linux to swap on. I could have made Linux use the same file as a swap space, but there was some article about how it's better to use a whole partition. Using that partition as swap for Linux would make Windows no longer recognize it as a file system.


So I decided to do something quite dangerous, at the risk of destroying all my data. I decided to create a cross linked partition table.


Using Peter Norton's Diskedit (Wasn't it just amazing how it brought up a graphics mouse pointer while still appearing to be in text mode?) I added a new partition entry, and pointed it to a range that lived within the page file of the Windows installation.


After booting into Linux, I used dd to backup a sector from that new partition (just in case), and then overwrote that with 0s. Reading the page file on the Windows swap partition showed the same block of 0s I had just written.


I added a mkswap and swapon command to the init scripts and and things worked perfectly on Linux.
Windows ran perfectly too, oblivious to the fact that the page file was doing double duty.


A dangerous and crazy trick, but it did the job for a long time, until I got a 4.3 gig drive.

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