Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 27 Mar 1996 13:30:08 +0200 | From | Andries.Brouwer@cwi ... | Subject | Re: Any "file" utility for partitions? |
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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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