Mounting extended vfat partition
 

I Wiped windBlow$ off my box completely however, left /dev/hda4 which is vfat there as it was my backup partition. Now that I have Redhat 9.0 exclusively on my box I cannot mount this partition.


I get the following.


[root@riddlebox /]# mount -t vfat /dev/hda4 /mnt/storage/
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?)
[root@riddlebox /]#


Is there any way to get the data off this partition? It has about 8GB of data on there that I'd really not like to lose.



Thanks for any help from anyone!

hda4 is not a fat32 partition. There is no such thing as an extended fat32 partition. an extended partition is a container for virtual partitions, which is what you are actaully after, it is probably hda5. run fdisk -l to list the partitions.

As you can see below it shows hda4 as a Fat32 Extended Partition. I'm not sure why but if you can help me somehow mount this d@#! thing I would be extremely happy to get that data. Thanks again!!!


[root@riddlebox root]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 3736 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 76 610438+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 77 1351 10241437+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 1352 2371 8193150 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 2372 3736 10964362+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 2372 3136 6144831 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 3137 3455 2562336 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 3456 3563 867478+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 3564 3664 811251 83 Linux
/dev/hda9 3665 3728 514048+ 82 Linux swap

Disk /dev/hdb: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 1022 2060320+ b Win95 FAT32
[root@riddlebox root]#

no it doesn't, it says it is a win95 LBA extended partition, this si NOT a fat32 file system. you can only have 4 primary / extended partitions on a drive, and so virtual partitions exist. naturally in order to accomodate these virtual partitions, you haev to give over one of the 4 main partitions. primary and extended parts are hda1-4 and virtual parts are hda5 and greater. you can even look at the cylinder data there...

/dev/hda4 2372 3736 10964362+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

so it starts at 2372 and ends at 3736, which is AFTER the swap partition, and therefore undenaiably contains those partitions. you can also see what a fat32 entry looks like on hdb1 if you needed any further proof.

Try using cfdisk. It list partitions on a drive better than fdisk. fdisk sometimes doesn't list the partitions correctly.

An Extended partition is a container but it doesn't contain virtual partitions. Those partitions are called logical partitions in the Extended partition, so /dev/hda5 through /dev/hda8 are logical drives and /dev/hd4 is an extended parttion containing all those logical drives.

I think LINUX killed your DOS partition or the other way around. The user killed the DOS partitions.

Since you have a DOS partition drive on /dev/hdb. Try making a DOS boot disk and see if you can find your data. Then copy the data to it.

You can't mount an extended partition. You mount a logical drive. Thus, you can't mount hda4. HOWEVER - That doesn't mean your data is gone. Try mounting hda5 - that's your first logical drive and probably has your data.

s/virtual/logical/g

pah i can never remember what they're called!

su
cd /mnt
mkdir windows
mount -t auto /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows


not sure if this will help but worth a try

but hda1 is a linux partition, and that's not what he's looking for....

from looking at the fdisk output
/dev/hda4 2372 3736 10964362+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 2372 3136 6144831 83 Linux
you can see that hda4 and hda5 start at the same point on the disk (2372), this is because hda4 (as mentioned above) contains the partitions 5-9 rather than data per se (note that hda9 ends just shy of where hda4 does, there is a little bit of wasted space). If you created those partitions and formatted them as Linux Native (and Swap) then you've probably lost the data you're looking for.

I thought in my post I said the user messed up his or her DOS partitions. FAT and FAT32 are DOS partitions.:tisk::mad:

naturally he should substitute hda4 for hda1

erm.. no ... that's the point. hda4 is an extended partition... :confused:

su
/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda4
*press "p"*
then mount the appropriate area? maybe? ignore my above posting.

again, this information is already shown in his fdisk output above. there *IS* no fat32 partition there...