Comment 3 for bug 512670

this occured with windows 2000, and I am pretty sure that it happened exactly as described, but that was awhile ago I might have misremembered something. It probably also depends on the specific sequence of the partitions.

Windows 2000 has a very finicky file system. These days winows 2000 is a lot less relevant but believe it or not it still gets used due to the costs and incompatibilites with legacy apps.

Perhaps other versions of MS Windows don't have this problem. However out-of-order partition tables are actually quite rare so I doubt very much that Microsoft spends significant time testing this scenario much less fixing any bugs found (MS Word shipped with 20000+ documented wontfix bugs because they weren't "common enough scenarios", as decided by them, even though some of those bugs caused crashes and corruption of documents).

If MS Windows is not known to have problems with out-of-order tables perhaps it's because people avoid creating them... ;-)

By the key point I am making is that any such partitioning scheme will need careful and extensive testing with multiple os versions and types. The complexity of the testing needed to ensure safe operation could exceed the effort to write the actual code.

I do like the concept, but it may be safer to put the effort into enabling GRUB to bypass the BIOS limitation.