Hello all,

I am trying to install ext4 on a partition which is inside an extended partition, but this command won't work:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2/sda8
mke2fs 1.43.5 (04-Aug-2017)
Could not open /dev/sda2/sda8: Not a directory

Where sda2 is the extended partition and sda8 is the partition I want to install ext4 on.

I also tried But it asked me this:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mke2fs 1.43.5 (04-Aug-2017)
Found a dos partition table in /dev/sda2
Proceed anyway? (y,N) N
and I am not sure if this is what I want. Is this going to overwrite all the partitions in sda2?

Here is the output of fdisk -l :
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 2099199 2097152 1G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2099200 81995775 79896576 38.1G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 2101248 2306047 204800 100M 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 65224704 81995775 16771072 8G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 2308096 44251135 41943040 20G 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 44253184 65222655 20969472 10G 83 Linux

I think conceptually this makes sense, but I do not know how to accomplish this.

Sda2 is not directly used in any commands.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda8

Verify the correct partition before running commands.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello and welcome to LQ.

You are confusing how an OS views the partition versus how you are viewing it I think. This is shown in your example of /sda2/sda8.

There are a few GUI's that may help visualize the drive as well as how the OS is viewing it. There are a few command line tools also.

Links like this may help. http://linuxbsdos.com/2014/11/08/a-b...ns-in-linux/2/

In your initial post, sda2 shows as an Extended partition which is a primary partition and a container for logical partitions and does not contain data or filesystems so as suggested, create the fs on sda8. The link in the previous post has a pretty detailed explanation.