mounting/accessing windows partitions of dynamic disk

jayant chauhan · 04-14-2004, 12:59 AM

Hey fellas

I recently bought a new harddisk (80 GB ). I have a P III 866 MHz. My primary master is still my 20 GB hard disk, which has XP and mandrake 9.1 installed. Now I made 4 partitions on my new hard disk, and the disk is a dynamic disk. The problem I am facing is that linux sees the hard disk all right, but see it as one contiguous HDD. It is not able to see the partitions, so I have no way of accessing these partitions.

Could some one please help me out with this, since most of my stuff now lies on the 80 GB HDD, especially all the entertainment stuff

motub · 04-14-2004, 05:57 AM

What do you mean by a "dynamic disk"? How is this different from a regular disk partition?

What do you mean by Linux being unable to see the partitions? How are you trying to look at the partitions?

What filesystem have you used to format the new partitions? If NTFS, it's possible that there is no NTFS support compiled into your kernel (not sure if MDK 9.1 had such support at all, even read-only).

Have you tried to mount one of the partitions? What was the output (if it didn't work)?

gripened · 04-18-2004, 04:40 PM

Winows has something known as dynamic disks/partitions, which I dontknow much about (as in, win2k, XP have it). Its different from a basic partition/disk. By not being accessible i mean, I can see the disk, but it just shows the disk as a whole, it is not able to gather information regarding the existing partitions in it. So I see no way I can mount the partitions. That is what my problem is.
The kernel does have support for NTFS (mandrake 9.1)

rignes · 04-18-2004, 06:50 PM

I don't know how to make Linux see dynamic disks. But, perhaps someone who is more knowledgeable than I can do something with this little snip from Mastering Windows 2003 Server (minasi).

Quote:

When you create a dynamic disk, you're writing a 1MB database of information at the end of that disk volume. This database contains all the partition information for each of the dynamic disks in the server. One of the nicer features of dynamic disks is that the information in that 1MB file is replicated to all the other dynamic disks in the system.

So, that being said, if someone has created a driver that can read and understand this 1MB file, then it would solve your problem.

Sorry I don't have a direct answer for you.

motub · 04-18-2004, 07:24 PM

Somehow that sparked an idea (thanks, rignes!), and searching for "windows dynamic disk linux read" produced this link to the Linux-kernel archives, which clearly states what is needed to solve this problem:

Quote:

> It it in any way possible that by using the Linux-LDM patch be able to
> convert dynamic disks to basic disks?

The LDM patch just allows the kernel to understand Windows new
partitioning. Without it you'll just see one BIG partition of type
0x42.

Now, I don't know what "the LDM patch" is, or where you can get it, not being a kernel hacker, but hopefully it won't be hard to find now that you have some idea what to look for. It's also possible that you don't even need this as an additional patch, depending on what kernel you're using; you might only need to enable a kernel option that you currently have set to off.

Hope this helps.

rignes · 04-18-2004, 09:06 PM

I just did some googling and came up with this link. I don't know if it has just what your looking for or not but here it is:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ldm.html

I also found what claims to be a driver here:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

Hope you find it useful.

jayant chauhan · 04-21-2004, 09:47 AM

Hey MOtub and rignes,
THanks guys, so LDM is what I am looking for, well lets see what I can do now. Thanks alot guys.