On Thu, 17 Jul 1997 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> And what does
> sfdisk -l -x -uS /dev/hda
> say?
# sfdisk -l -x -uS /dev/hda
Disk /dev/hda: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 824 cylinders
Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System
[snip]
/dev/hda11 701631 1524095 822465 83 Linux native
- 1524096 3322367 1798272 5 DOS Extended
- 701568 701567 0 0 Empty
- 701568 701567 0 0 Empty
- 1524096 1524095 0 0 Empty
- 1524096 1524095 0 0 Empty
- 1524096 1524095 0 0 Empty
- 1524096 1524095 0 0 Empty
Ah, very good, that makes everything clear.
You do not really have a partition hda12, but the kernel
(in genhd.c) temporarily assigns this internal DOS Extended
partition to hda12, just to be able to read its first sector
and then give the name hda12 to the data partition inside.
But there was no data partition inside, and this temporary
name was never discarded, so that is why you were able to
access hda12.
This is a kernel buglet, however, and sooner or later it
will be fixed. You should make a data partition there.
Andries