Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 25 Sep 2003 01:05:03 +0100 | From | viro@parcelfa ... | Subject | Re: rfc: test whether a device has a partition table |
| |
On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 01:50:41AM +0200, Andries Brouwer wrote: > > On closer examination it seems to be the partition table > > which is read ok (as one partition) on W2K and XP > > but Linux (both 2.4 and 2.6) gets really confused and > > thinks there are 4 malformed partitions. > > and > > > Linux probably needs to handle this situation more > > gracefully. A local police force bought a bunch of > > these devices for Linux based forensic work. They > > are a bit disappointed at the moment. > > So, now not only theory but also practice is involved, and > we must do something.
If there *is* a partition table with one entry and it gets misparsed - we have a real bug that has to be dealt with and your heuristics won't help. If there is no partition table at all and in fact they have a filesystem on the entire disk - let them use *entire* *disk*. You can very well read /dev/sd<letter>, mount it, whatever. Here I do have a SCSI disk that is not partitioned at all. And guess what? It works with no extra efforts needed:
Vendor: QUANTUM Model: ATLAS10K3_18_SCA Rev: 020W Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 sym53c1010-33-0-<0,0>: tagged command queue depth set to 4 Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 sym53c1010-33-0-<0,*>: FAST-20 WIDE SCSI 40.0 MB/s (50.0 ns, offset 31) SCSI device sda: 35916548 512-byte hdwr sectors (18389 MB) sda: unknown partition table
al@satch:~/kernel/2.5$ mount | grep sda /dev/sda on /mnt/sda type ext2 (rw)
Note that usb-storage looks like a SCSI host for the rest of kernel, so that's exactly the same situation - device that is expected to be partitioned but in reality isn't.
So what precisely are you trying to fix? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |