> Where I apparently ran into problems was trying to read a disk with a
> partitioned NTFS file system made under NT with Linux. It apparently
> cannot do that. And then I compounded the problem by looking at the disk
> with Linux fdisk, which showed me the apparent size of about 150 MB.
^^^^
About 150Mb * 4 = about 600 Mb (the true capacity of these disks -- 640 is
with "commercial" megabytes (10^6 instead of the One True Definition Of
Mega (1024^2)).
512 (the 'usual' sector size for most media) * 4 = 2048 (the MOD-640
sector size).
Is that a coincidence, or a bug in NT (which one day will become "law") ?
Interestingly, Win9* has no problem reading NT-partitioned disks (as long
as they're formatted in VFAT), so it must be following the same
definition. Looks like there's a mismatch between Win* and Linux (and
perhaps the tiny rest of the world) regarding the unit used in parition
tables to describe the disk. My first bet was that fdisk counted in
512-byte blocks where Win* were counting in actual sector sizes, but after
looking into the relevant code in Linux' kernel, I got really puzzled, it
seems to care about actual sector size and count in that units... only
seems, alas !
(although a little pointless, partitioning a cartridge into several chunks
with Linux fdisk and then making several ext2 systems on it works very
well).
Now, if a fix is to be written, whatever the way it is written, it must
recognise all previously partitioned disks (by Linux old fdisk as well
as Win*), as well as the possible new common format. Is that really
desirable ? I don't know.
-- Cyrille
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Zog Zog
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