[techtalk] mounting dos extended partitions

[Wendt,Andrew]

On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, you wrote:

>I have 2 hard drives on my system.
>drive 1 is partitioned to C and E in windows.
>drive 2 is D and also is where I put linux-mandrake 6.0.
>
>now, I can mount my atapi zip, no problem, and my d drive where my dos files
>are
>(I have added lines to my fstab file, and have nice devices added to KDE
>that actually work)
>
>but I tried to enter /dev/hda2 to get to the partition "e" on my first hard
>drive and when I do that I get the message that either too many are being
>mounted, and then something asking me if what I was trying to actually do
>was mount an extended partition. they are right, so, what do I have
>incorrect?

Logical parititons inside an extended partition are numbered from 5 upwards.
Non-logical partitions can be 1-4, so they start where these leave off.

When I forget my partition numbers, I usually load up fdisk and type the `p'
command, which gives me a list like this:

   Device Boot    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      518  4160803+   b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2           519      768  2008125   83  Linux native
/dev/hda3           769      784   128520   82  Linux swap 

You can type q to leave fdisk without hurting anything. :-)

Also, when you boot you might see a message like this:

Partition check:
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 < hda5 hda6 >

This tells you that you have two logical partitions, hda5 and hda6, inside your
extended partition hda3. You can use the `dmesg' command to print out your
bootup messages again and hopefully you'll see this.

TTFN

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