[GLLUG] Ext2 recovery

[Matt Graham]

On Monday 09 September 2002 15:05, after a long battle with technology, 
Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> writes:
> > First, ZIP disks are always partitioned, so /dev/hdX is not
> > right.
>
> This is not necessarily the case.  You don't have to partition
> hard drives if you don't want to, and in the same way you don't
> have to partition Zip disks.  You just mkfs /dev/hdX instead of
> /dev/hdXN.

True, but consider that all ZIP disks used in DOS/Windows machines must 
be partitioned.  (Backwards combatability, since the very first ZIP 
drives were not ATAPI devices, and DOS expects non-ATAPI IDE or SCSI 
devices to be partitioned before there's a filesystem on them.)  Using 
a ZIP without a partition table is typically only possible if it 
contains an HFS filesystem.

I was going for a "real world" answer instead of a "correct" answer, in 
other words.

> You can tell because fdisk /dev/hdX won't print anything sensible
> if it's used on a disk that isn't partitioned.

Or if the partition table is munged.  I remember some 'DozeNT HFS driver 
that managed to mangle the partition table of a FAT16 ZIP disk when 
used, leading to an interesting report from "fdisk -l /dev/hdd".  Who 
knew a ZIP disk could have 4 "unknown" or Novell partitions of about 
1.4G each?  A long session with dd and dosfsck followed.

-- 
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