• Olaf Hering's avatar
    [PATCH] ignore partition table on disks with AIX label · e1dfa92d
    Olaf Hering authored
    The on-disk data structures from AIX are not known, also the filesystem
    layout is not known.  There is a msdos partition signature at the end of
    the first block, and the kernel recognizes 3 small (and overlapping)
    partitions.  But they are not usable.  Maybe the firmware uses it to find
    the bootloader for AIX, but AIX boots also if the first block is cleared.
    
    This is the content of the partition table:
     # dd if=/dev/sdb count=$(( 4 * 16 )) bs=1 skip=$(( 0x1be )) | xxd
    0000000: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
    0000010: 80ff ffff 41ff ffff 1b11 0000 381b 0000  ....A.......8...
    0000020: 00ff ffff 41ff ffff 0211 0000 1900 0000  ....A...........
    0000030: 80ff ffff 41ff ffff 1b11 0000 381b 0000  ....A.......8...
    
    Handle the whole disk as empty disk.
    
    This fixes also YaST which compares the output from parted (and formerly
    fdisk) with /proc/partitions.  fdisk recognizes the AIX label since a long
    time, SuSE has a patch for parted to handle the disk label as unknown.
    
    dmesg will look like this:
     sda: [AIX]  unknown partition table
    
    Tested on an IBM B50 with AIX V4.3.3.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarOlaf Hering <olh@suse.de>
    Cc: Albert Cahalan <acahalan@gmail.com>
    Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    e1dfa92d
msdos.c 13.3 KB