While this undocumented behaviour allows them to cope with these incorrectly formatted volumes specifically, it limits the flexibility of disk geometries they can work with in general and can cause them to trash validly formatted volumes created by third-parties if they deviate from the defaults used by Microsoft and IBM.
While this unrecorded behavior enables them to handle these improperly formatted volumes uniquely, it restricts their adaptability to various disk geometries generally and might corrupt validly formatted volumes created by third-parties if they differ from the defaults used by Microsoft and IBM.