Mounting Extended XP Partition
 

Help. I have a Dell with 2 hd's. The first one, 80GB is partitioned into 2x40, the second, a 60GB is partitioned into 1x40 and 1x20.

when I type in fdisk -l /dev/hda I get:


Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 5100 40965718+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 5101 5113 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 5114 5178 522112+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 5179 9729 36555907+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 5179 7728 20482843+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 7729 9003 10241406 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 9004 9663 5301418+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 9664 9728 522081 82 Linux swap

I want to mount hda5, thats where I have all my data, you know, stuff I've downloaded, etc.

I have created a mount point under /mnt called XP_P2P.
I then did the following

chmod a+rw /mnt/XP_P2P

No problems so far. then I mounted or tried to with

mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/XP_P2P -t vfat

and got the following message

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda4,
or too many mounted file systems
(aren't you trying to mount an extended partition,
instead of some logical partition inside?)

Linux is not seeing the extended partition as a fat32 partition, instead it sees it as a extended partition, and so without a fs.

How do I solve this?

Anyone, Help please!!!

Re: Mounting Extended XP Partition
 

Just like the error message says you can't mount an extended partition. An extended partition in simple terms is just a container for your logical drives which is any device >= /dev/hda5. And it doesn't contain any data.

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ld...w/history.html

In reality your first drive is partition into 8 partitions. 4 primary, 4 logical.

Since windows ignores any non windows partition types I will assume that your 2nd hard drive is formated as FAT32 and is your D and E drives.

I also suspect that is where your data is located. Use fdisk again to see how it is partitioned and use the same methods to mount them.

I have the following setup.

Under XP:

Drive 1 (80GB): has two partitions; partition 1 (40GB, FAT32) is
my C drive, partition 2 is my main linux
drive/partition.

Drive 2 (60GB): has two partitions; partition 1 (40GB/Extended
partition - FAT32) is my D drive, partition 2 is the
rest of my linux drives, partitioned under linux,
installing RH7.3, over which I installed RH9.0


I checked both drives under XP and they poped up as FAT32 drives.

I have set my XP drive D, as my download/data/p2p drive. This is the drive I want access to.

I can't tell which partitions I need to mount. I also don't understand why the list says that my extended drive is drive F. It used to be F before I re-did my XP installation. I now have drives C, D, E and F, whereby drives E and F are my DVD and CD-RW respectively.

How do I see what the extended partition contains, and what the logical drives are made up of or contain? Do I then mount drives hda5, hda6 and hda7 as FAT32 drives to get access to the XP stuff?

I am getting a little confused here with all the partitions and stuff :-). I hope you or anyone can help.


Thanks.

If you look at your first post your 1st drive has 8 partitions. 40gb for XP and the rest is used for linux. I assume you did a server auto partition install which is why you have so many.

Assuming that your 2nd drive is the slave on the first controller then to see how its partitioned:

fdisk -l /dev/hdb

I will assume that your D: drive is probably /dev/hdb1.

Like my previous post said the extended partition is just a place holder for logical partitions and does not contain data. All of the logical partitions on your 1st drive (/dev/hda5-7) are setup for linux. You can see how they are used if you look at the /etc/fstab file.

/dev/hda1 * 1 5100 40965718+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda4 5179 9729 36555907+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

The c & f you are refering to is the filesystem type not the drive letter. This is actually the hexidecimal value associated with the filesystem type.

Thanks. I tried out the hdb1 line, and it worked. I now have both, my C and D drives mounted.