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You know, I thought that about FAT32. But apparently neither Windows nor Mac OS X can see a FAT32 partition on an SD card if it's not the primary partition (at,
by cozzyd 6y ago
You know, I thought that about FAT32. But apparently neither Windows nor Mac OS X can see a FAT32 partition on an SD card if it's not the primary partition (at, least, not in an obvious way).
- nucleardog 6y agoDon't think that's exclusive to FAT32. For quite a while Windows just straight up ignored anything but the first partition on removeable media.
- derefr 6y agoWindows and macOS do that in order to hide EFI system partitions, I believe. (Not that they should have to; MBR and GPT both define a specific tag to mark a partition as being an EFI partition. But so many partitioning tools don't bother to use that tag—or to adhere to any other standard that could be used to identify an EFI partition—that OSes are stuck with a very bad/loose heuristic.) They may also get some other benefits from this bad/loose heuristic, e.g. hiding Linux's common FAT32 /boot partition; OEMs' "backup" and "BIOS update" partitions; OS Recovery partitions from unknown (and therefore unpredictable-in-approach) OSes; etc. What the consumer OSes really need is a bit in each MBR/GPT partition's bitflags, that has a meaning equivalent to one of those "no user-serviceable parts inside" stickers. I think it's too late to fit that bit into either standard, sadly.