On Sat, 11 Nov 2000, Nicholas Clark wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 07:58:41AM -0800, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 02:15:30PM +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> >
> >  > Does NetBSD do Linux ext2fs read write? And can it understand the partition
> >  > table that Linux/arm uses? If the answer is yes&yes this would be useful
> >  > even without Linux/arm emulation as I could painless install NetBSD on the
> >  > spare root partition my ARM Linux setup currently has. (and triple boot)
> >
> > It can handle the file system just fine.  What kind of partition table
> > does Linux/arm use?
>
> For a standard motherboard IDE drive it appears to take the drive space
> beyond ADFS, treat it as a physical partition and write a logical partition
> table, with 3 words per partition.
> On boot I see:
>
> Partition check:
>  hda: [ADFS] hda1 [Linux] hda2 < hda3 hda4 hda5 hda6 >
>
>
> the start of my /dev/hda2 looks like this:
>
> 0000000 deafa1de 00000002 00200001 deafa1de
> 0000020 00200003 00200001 deafab1e 00400004
> 0000040 00040001 deafa1de 00440005 0098c2eb
> 0000060 d31f8edf 19863e30 2f9c1e64 36d8b495
>
> 1st word is a flag
>  deafa1de is the flag for ext2fs
>  deafab1e is the flag for swap
>
> 2nd word is start sector of this logical within the physical
> 3rd is length in sectors
>
> sectors are 512 bytes.
>
> my /dev/hda3, /dev/hda4 and /dev/hda6 are ext2fs, 3 & 4 are 1G, 6 is over 4G
>  /dev/hda5 is my swap, 130748K according to top. (~128M)
> /dev/hda1 is ADFS, and is mounted.
>
> That d31f8edf marks the end. I don't know if it's particularly special. As
> far as the code loop is concerned "it's not (deafa1de or deafab1e) so stop
> looking for more, print the '>'"
>
> The code reads a block of 1024 bytes, so it appears that this table is
> allocated 2 512 sectors.
>
	We already have an 'mbrlabel' which can be used to build a
	disklabel from an MBR (DOS/Windows) only disk. Is anyone
	interested in putting together a utility to do the same for
	a linux disk? At the very least to read the linux logical
	partition table and output something like
		  g:  4188177       63      EXT2FS
	:)



                David/absolute
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