Dumb gnubie hard disk question, part II

[Jonas Norlander]

2008/10/24 Eberhard Roloff <tuxebi at gmx.de>:
> 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

If you have a floppy drive and a DOS boot disk you can run fdisk /mbr
to write a new mbr.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013

/ Jonas