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Re: fstab/mount filesystem nomenclature



On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 03:35:25PM -0500, David Turetsky wrote:
> 
> What is the appropriate nomenclature for logical/entended partitions in
> fstab and elsewhere
> 
> For example, hde1 (or hda1) is the base partition. If I use an extended
> partition, is that hde2 or what
<snip> 
> I might be able to resolve this more fully if I good see the dialog that
> flashes by on booting. That's what led me to use hde. The rest of it goes
> by too fast to read. How do I redirect that startup stream

To get a list of the partitions on /dev/hde do: fdisk -l /dev/hde
To get the disk partition stuff out of the boot messages: dmesg | grep hd
(or just dmesg | less to page through the whole lot)

Some examples from my system. This is a SCSI drive so it's /dev/sd?
instead of /dev/hd?, but everything else is the same.

# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 255 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *         1        26    208813+   6  FAT16
/dev/sdb2            27        90    514080    6  FAT16
/dev/sdb3            91        94     32130    5  Extended
/dev/sdb4            95       255   1293232+   b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/sdb5            91        91      8001    1  FAT12
/dev/sdb6            92        92      8001    1  FAT12
/dev/sdb7            93        93      8001    1  FAT12
/dev/sdb8            94        94      8001    1  FAT12

Here, /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2 are primary DOS partitions, /dev/sdb3 is
an extended partition, and /dev/sdb4 is a primary Windoze partition.

Having numbered all the primary partitions, we now start numbering the
logical partitions inside the extended partition. So these are
numbered /dev/sdb5 ... /dev/sdb8. These are logical partitions of the
very small DOS variety (they are in fact "dummies" to keep Windoze's
drive letters consistent after I shuffled my hard disks around).

You can tell these are extended partitions because their start and end
figures are within the range of the start and end figures of the
extended partition (91 - 94).

You can also tell from the dmesg output:

# dmesg | grep sdb
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 4110000 512-byte hdwr sectors (2104 MB)
 sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 < sdb5 sdb6 sdb7 sdb8 > sdb4

This notation means that sdb5 ... sdb8 are logical partitions inside
the extended partition sdb3.

Note: you can't mount an extended partition. You have to mount the
logical partition(s) inside it.

So if you have a base partition hde1, and an extended partition hde2,
and that's it for primary partitions, your first logical drive inside
the extended partition will be hde3, and that's what you need to be
mounting, if I've understood your problem correctly.

Pigeon



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