| Bill Jonas on Sat, 4 May 2002 16:40:09 +0200 |
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On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 09:20:33PM -0400, George Langford, Sc.D. wrote: > The only real hitch was that I could not do anything with a > couple of file systems called "Extended" by Hardware Browser. > The automatic detection of file_system works great for FAT, > but not for Extended, it seems. At least for me, the neophyte. If you look at your partitions with fdisk (eg, "fdisk -l /dev/hdb"), you'll notice that those extended partitions share their entire disk space with partitions numbered 5 and higher. On a hard disk in a PC, the partition table is 64 bytes long. Each partition requires 16 bytes of space on the disk. 64 / 16 = 4. The "64" and the "16" can't be changed, for backward-compatibility reasons. So, the method that was developed to allow more than 4 partitions was to take one of the partition table entries, allocate a portion of the disk to it, and allow that part of the disk to be sub-partitioned. The big "container" partition is called an "extended partition". This is what you were seeing. It can't be mounted, and it's treated specially. See also: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition-3.html#LOGICAL http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition-5.html#MIXED http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwtab.htm -- Bill Jonas * bill@billjonas.com * http://www.billjonas.com/ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin Attachment:
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