by It has been said here many times that extended DOS partitions could be
mounted without trouble. Until today, I've been wondering what all the
fuss was about.
So, just now I tried for the first time to mount an extended DOS
partition and found that I couldn't:
# ls -l /dev/wd0s[3-9]
brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 0x00040002 Jul 12 11:26 /dev/wd0s3
brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 0x00050002 Jul 12 11:26 /dev/wd0s4
brw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 0x00060002 Jul 13 20:17 /dev/wd0s5
# mount -r -t msdos /dev/wd0s3 /mnt
msdos: /dev/wd0s3: Invalid argument
# mount -r -t msdos /dev/wd0s4 /mnt
msdos: /dev/wd0s4: Invalid argument
# mount -r -t msdos /dev/wd0s5 /mnt
msdos: /dev/wd0s5: Device not configured
Accordoding to the handbook, wd0s5 should have worked OK.
When I run fdisk, I see this:
# fdisk
******* Working on device /dev/rwd0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=658 heads=64 sectors/track=63 (4032 blks/cyl)
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=658 heads=64 sectors/track=63 (4032 blks/cyl)
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 0 is:
sysid 6,(Primary 'big' DOS (> 32MB))
start 63, size 822465 (401 Meg), flag 0
beg: cyl 0/ sector 1/ head 1;
end: cyl 203/ sector 63/ head 63
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 822528, size 1225728 (598 Meg), flag 80
beg: cyl 204/ sector 1/ head 0;
end: cyl 507/ sector 63/ head 63
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 15,(unknown)
start 2048256, size 604800 (295 Meg), flag 0
beg: cyl 508/ sector 1/ head 0;
end: cyl 657/ sector 63/ head 63
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
Notice that the partition type flag for my extended partition is not
recognised by fdisk. Is it maybe not being recognised by the slice
code or the msdos filesystem? This partition was created by Win95
OSR2's fdisk. I formatted it as a vanilla FAT16.
I used fdisk -u to change the partition ID to 5 (Extended DOS) and
rebooted, and all of a sudden I can mount the /dev/wd0s5 okay.
Win95 seems happy enough with the partition type set this way, but
I do kind of wonder what might go wrong down the road due to this
change.
Any insights?
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Gardner Buchanan +1 613 751 4800 x5635