Splitting up !Boot

We need at least a separation of !Boot into the “system part” and the “user-changeable part”. At the moment, !Boot includes too many things of completely different character.

Correct.

As far as I see it, what is needed to sort out the loader issue is a partitioning tool, rather than complete partition support for the OS.

At the very least, Hform having the ability create a regular partition table with a corresponding entry for partition 4 for the area it had just formatted. Then use a tool from another OS to create the rest.

Current RO should only see the RO partition as a regular drive. DOSFS and FAT32FS would presumably need modification to cope (unless the latter already can).

Current RO should only see the RO partition as a regular drive. DOSFS and FAT32FS would presumably need modification to cope (unless the latter already can).

And ADFS and SDFS too, which is the problem. There is currently no mechanism for those to define a start offset for the one and only partition. Only SCSIFS can cope (which is used by Fat32FS to support large media) with a partition not starting at the very beginning.

I think you are missing my point. You create the ADFS partition where RISC OS expects it, (but not using the whole disk) you then have a partition table (which RISC OS ignores) with the final* entry corresponding to the partition, this will protect it from being overwritten by other OSes, and then the rest of the disk can be used by them.

*Just in case any boot loaders are hard wired to only use the first entry to boot from.

You won’t get full partition support, but the disk produced will allow extra non ADFS partitions and will be standard for other OSes.