Sylvain Petreolle wrote:
Why should we have to erase existing partitions in the first place ? ReactOS has to be able to read valid partitions without destroying them.
Kind regards, Sylvain Petreolle
The partition table must be recreated beause the geometry of the disk changes. In most cases users will not be able to access a partition created by ReactOS using Windows or Linux because of the different geometries. I tested the old geometry using gparted and it always reported a damaged partition table until I switched to the new geometry.
Unfortunately there is no reliable method to derive the disk geometry from the partition table. That's why ReactOS cannot detect the old geometry in a reliabe way. And since Windows and Linux do not care about the reported geometry of the harddisk and always use the 63/255 geometry instead, I don't see any reason not to use the new geometry.
BTW, Windows and Linx switched to the 'new' geometry more than 10 years ago. It's time for us to get rid of this ancient feature (or burden) too.
PS: GPT partitions are geometry agnostic. For them a partition is just a sequence of sectors.
Regards Eric