Re:Students are failing AP tests because the College Board c...
by derefr on Thursday May 21, 2020 @03:52PM
(#23264121)
Windows 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.
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.