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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!disco.iinet.net.au!news.uoregon.edu!hunter.premier.net!bofh.dot!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Mounting extended DOS partitions Date: 19 May 1996 23:33:04 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 38 Message-ID: <4nob3g$35i@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4nlopm$he4@usenet4.interramp.com> <319E9701.394F@netaxs.com> <4nn5sh$1ii@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4nnqh5$jt0@usenet7.interramp.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E myers@freebsd.interramp.com (David C. Myers) wrote: > Just to follow up with the answer... After a bit of research, I found that > you can enable extended DOS partitions, but as I suspected, you need to add > some additional slice devices to your /dev directory. FreeBSD > pre-allocated wd0s1, wd0s2, wd0s3, and wd0s4 for you. wd0s1 is your > primary DOS partition, and is mountable using the standard mount -t msdos > command. The other partitions are not mountable; I have no idea what > they're for. wd0s1 through wd0s4 are the four table slots in the primary fdisk table. Which of the slots carries what depends from which program has been creating the entries, and in which sequence. I've seen fdisk programs as well that started out in slot 4, so your primary DOS partition could be as well wd0s4. On a FreeBSD system, one of the slots is usually occupied by the FreeBSD slice, and if you've got a so-called extended DOS partition, it allocates a slot by its own, though you can't do much with it (it's just a `container' for the remaining partitions, similarly to the Russian Matryoshka dollies). While the extended partitions are only allocated as they have been found, the four primary slots are statically pre-allocated, and always have these names, regardless of whether the slots are actually used or not. In theory, you can even have two of them allocated by DOS partitions, i think DOS will be able to work with it as well, but it doesn't let you create them itself. Of course, you can also have two FreeBSD slices, but due to limitations in the bootstrap, you can only boot off the first of them (by entry # in the fdisk table, while the disk position is irrelevant). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)