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On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 01:10:02 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote about Re: |
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[gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to |
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disklabels: |
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>On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:53:25 +0000, David W Noon wrote: |
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[snip] |
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>> Your extended partition begins at sector 124. Any idea what is |
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>> occupying sectors 0 - 123 ? |
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> |
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>No idea, I used cfdisk, which must have decided it was a good idea to |
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>leave that area untouched. It doesn't show as free space. |
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Well, sector 0 holds the MBR for the entire disk. But everybody reading |
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this mailing list would have known that. |
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What I suspect is in the remainder of that space is a hidden primary |
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partition containing a "transparent" bootstrap that augments the BIOS |
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and permits booting from a logical/extended partition. This would be |
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similar to the old OS/2 Boot Manager, although that was hardly |
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transparent. This hidden partition was probably placed there by cfdisk |
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when you first partitioned the drive and started it with an extended |
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partition. The OS/2 FDISK.COM did something similar when the first |
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partition on a drive was not a primary (including Boot Manager). |
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A forensic examination of that area would be of interest. |
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-- |
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Regards, |
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Dave [RLU #314465] |
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dwnoon@××××××××.com (David W Noon) |
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