Re: /proc/partitions broken in 2.5.23

[Andries Brouwer]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 01:44:02PM +0200, Dave Jones wrote:

> hda2 is odd looking too showing a #blocks of '1', when
> it's actually..
> 
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda2           234     58168  29199240    5  Extended 

That is correct, and something I did before you were born.

An extended partition is a box containing logical partitions.
It is almost always an error when people want to write directly to it
(confusing the extended partition with some logical partition inside).
After a number of reports of people who messed up their disk
by doing mkswap or mkfs on an extended partition I changed
the length of an extended partition to 1 block, enough for LILO
but stopping mkswap and mkfs.
People who really want to access these blocks, like e.g. fdisk,
can do so via /dev/hda.

Andries