Dumb gnubie hard disk question, part II

[Eberhard Roloff]

Art Alexion wrote:
> On Thursday 23 October 2008 11:09:43 am Eberhard Roloff wrote:
>> Art Alexion wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 2:26 AM,  <jdesmond at fast.net> wrote:
>>>>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>>>> /dev/sdb1   *           1        1023     8217243   55  EZ-Drive
>>>>
>>>> And then:
>>>>
>>>> john at blackbox:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/westdigA
>>>> mount: you must specify the filesystem type
>>> EZ-Drive is microsoft's implementation of LVM.  It is not a standard
>>> NTFS partition.  I don't know if mount currently handles it.  Perhaps
>>> someone has an answer?
>>>
>>> If you boot windows, right click "my computer and select  manage,
>>> there is a branch of the tree for managing drives.  Using that
>>> utility, you can convert the drive to regular NTFS and mount it under
>>> Linux.
>> I am afraid, this is not correct.
>>
>> Imho EZ-drive was used years ago as a sort of overlay Bios to use the
>> full harddrive capacity when the old Bios could not recognize (all of) it.
> 
> OK.  I was wrong about it being a MS product, and it is not LVM, but it 
> functions like LVM in that it can also have a large logical partition span 
> multiple disks.  
> 
> I responded to this without web research, but based on the advice of a 
> co-worker when I first encountered one of these partitions last week.  
> WindowsXP would not mount the drive automatically either.  The disk 
> management utility presented me with the options of "importing" it 
> (essentially mounting it without changing it) or converting it to NTFS of 
> FAT32.
> 
Well, honestly it is more than a decade ago that I used this for a 200 
MB!! drive on my old 468/66. If I remember correctly this works as an 
intermediate Partitiontable which translates larger harddisk data to 
what old Biossses know.
As both Windows (since NT 4 imho) and Linux for years work without Bios 
Support for reading disks, it might work ok. Nevertheless imho the real 
challenge is not how to convert the filesystem, but how to get cleanly 
rid of the ezcode within the mbr.

Kind regards
Eberhard