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SubjectRe: Any "file" utility for partitions?
Bjorn Ekwall:

: Let me tell you what I want to do with this utility:

: When booting a system enhanced with bzImage and initrd I would
: like to be able to scan a large set of possible partitions.
: If a partition is readable, I would like to be able to find
: out more precisely what type it is, so that I can more or less
: automatically find the _real_ root partition without having to
: encode this in the initrd image, or having to pass an argument
: to the boot-mechanism (lilo, loadlin, whatever...).

Horrors!
That is not the way to write system software.
How are you going to distinguish my root partition from the backup
that I made last month (before doing something dangerous) with
"dd if=/dev/hdc3 of=/dev/sda9" ?
How are you going to distinguish between my five root partitions
that all occur in /etc/lilo.conf ?

If you want to find the root partition, then read all type 83
partitions, and check for the presence of /etc/passwd.
That will work for 80% of the people.
But I am not going to run such software.

Andries


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