How about a future GPartEd with an X front simple text editor

GPartEd is a very intelligent programme. How about a future GPartEd with an X front simple text editor to edit grub.conf on SATA/ATA mixed system like Dell.

GPartEd-live is impressive.  It did recognise and able to handle over 15 partitions per disk limitation imposed by historic devfs convention set by Linux author back in late 1980’s.  Not only Linux but all Unix like OS need to come up to a common or universal block device mapping convention.  Idealistically need to improve together with ongoing udevfs usb support convention upgrade uniformly on amongst all Unix variants to let the world know Unix/Linux are more intelligent choice for everyone.

GPartEd wass one of most intelligent disk partitioning programme I know of since it’s enumeration went deep into PCI root bridge and able to identify the difference between PCIE, PCIX and PCI. I do know smart Sun OS and Aix assigns different controller number but I am just a  photographer/graphic artist and not experienced enough to tell if they identified device mapping from PCI root bridge level. 

I have been totally bogged into SCSI subsystem from the time in mid 1990’s when wide SCSI replaced ESDI (Initially ESDI was 3 times faster than SCSI due to native 16 bit wide interface supported by dedicated 32 bit I/O processors and 32 bit memory on Control Data Corp. EISA ESDI controllers and alike whereas initial SCSI was only 8 bit wide PIO until about 1994 untill CDC, IBM and Seagate merged SCSI development efforts began to pay off).

Since that time, I have avoided effort to lean any other block device technologies including Fire wire, Fibre Channel, IDE, ATA, SATA and USB and alike because SCSI was so comfortable on Unix and it’s variant platform including Linux and even on Windows NT. Now however, because of my ignorance to these newer technologies I have been brutally hit this year. I used to build own systems so that I can use SCSI and all the OS worked well without single complaint. This OS support trends for SCSI will continue for few more years but SCSI device production has got so scarce that no spare parts will be available by 2010 if I do not learn newer technologies at time.

Finally It has come into the generation that no one produce parallel SCSI device.  I believe that Scanners and Printers abandoned parallel SCSI interface in favour of USB in late 1990’s and DVD and CD ROM abandoned SCSI in favour of IDE/EIDE/SATA in 2002.  Then disk manufacturers are going to abandon parallel SCSI as well in the next few years.   Recently I have purchased a Dell Dimension and I am stunned with the extreme difficulties to set up a multi-boot with non Microsoft operating systems.  Even Microsoft Operating system like XP and NT did not install right and required updated drivers.  Windows NT 4.0 installer caused severe kernel panic when it saw Intel 82801GB with two 300GB SATA drives.  I had no choice but disable both SATA disks and Ultra ATA 133 (DVD ROM) channel and temporarily connect two Adaptec cards with long time familiar Seagate Cheetah and SCSI CD-ROM on second SCSI and set video at VGA 16 colour. Of course with this special setup, Windows NT 4.0 did install without kernel panic. Then I gradually loaded 3rd party SATA driver came from the other side of world, thereafter I transfer NT to SATA drive and removed SCSI subsystem due to space limitation.

Now NT 4.0 works quite well and recognises both 945G north 82801G south PCIE root bridges. Windows 9X does install however, but does not recognise PCIE root bridge, therefore I can not even get proper display nor proper protected mode disk support. It took me a full day just to get USB root controller recognised by fooling OS with legacy 82801AA or 82801AB from 800’s chipset era one step at time.  I will continue to fight against Intel’s driver development policies so seemingly controlled by economic interest of OS manufacturers.  Even the third world can develop drivers for legacy OS so why not Intel release proper drivers in the USA? I have a deep respect for Adaptec, ICP Vortex, ATI, Matrox and Seagate those who kept support for OSes back to DOS,  Windows 3.X, early Linux kernels and SCO OS 5.X until about 2001 era by not been influenced by Software manufacturer/distributor and by political leaderships of this nation. 

Almost all Unix like OS including Linux 2.6.X do installs properly on SATA disks with full colour X window and USB as longer as I enable just one disk I/O channel at one time but not with both Ultra ATA and SATA together.  Most Linux thinks Ultra ATA and SATA are both SCSI since they are tied with Unified ASPI interface.  Where as Unix and Sun OS map block devices by root controller number ea; c0t0d0p0  (controller – target – disk – partition) which is a lot smarter and fool proof but unfortunately GNU GRUB and LILO can easily get confused therefore fails to boot when all the disk channels are turned on ea; multiple SATA disks, ATA disk and CD ROM simultaneously. I believe that OS and boot loader have inconsistent boot partition device designation between them.  Even none of commercial boot loader System Commander and likes can not resolve the problem.  I think I can only resolve the problem by manually editing grub.conf, lilo.conf, mtab or fstab and like.  It would really help if the GPartEd could handle ufs support and simple text editor launched from ram disk or just even ext2/3 with a text editor.

Note: A joke about some OS.  If you install Linux in a logical partition(s) on in a Windows 98/ME shared SCSI system, Windows tries to assign drive letter onto ext2 or ext3 partitions and complain disk error and tries to format these partitions, then crush itself violently if you let it by just pressing “Enter