[Novalug] Resolved: Mystery "Partition" - How to Fix?

Roger W. Broseus rogerb@bronord.com
Tue Mar 19 18:21:45 EDT 2013


Thanks to Jon LaBadie's persistence, the problem has been solved.

THANKS Jon.

Diagnosis:
/FAT32 is NOT a mounted filesystem.  It is merely a directory on your root filesystem. Three reasons I can state that.  Mount doesn't know about it. df tells me it is "mounted" (i.e. part of) the root fs. And
lastly its inode number is not 2 (or 1 for a dos fs).

For this last bit, consider a filesystem in isolation.  One you have just created with mkfs. There are lots of inodes available, none have been assigned to any file or directory.  As part of creating the filesystem the top level (or starting or root) directory of that filesystem is created.  It gets the first inode allocated.  I forget the reason, but on UNIX and Linux inode #1 is not used.  So the top dir gets inode #2.  Thus, ls -i should always report a 2 on mount points.

Based on ls -i of /fat32 the msdos filesystems do not reserve inode number 1 but assign them to the root dir.

Solution:
     rm -rf /FAT32

It worked. (I also had to give ownership of /fat32 to myself as it was owned 
by root.) Now I just have /fat32 appearing in directory listings, etc.

Background: I said:
> After partitioning and repartitioning, as discussed before for my 1TB HD, I
> find a "mystery partition" that I can not figure out.
>
> One appears as "FAT32" size 18.5GB. Another one appears as "fat32" with 26.4
> GB of space attributed to it.
>
> Both were owned by root and I was able to change this to my username for
> FAT32. Even as root, I can not change permissions for the "fat32" drive.
>
> The curious thing is that only ONE partition appears with the name "fat32" and
> that is /dev/sdc4 with a size of 26 GB (on the 1 TB HD). There are no other
> partitions formatted as fat32 on any of the three HDs I have installed. BTW: I
> got rid of the mis-alignment warnings previously discussed by repartitioning
> the 1 TB drive.)
>
> I'm totally puzzled about this and would like to fix it.

-- 
--
Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
     Email: RogerB@bronord.com
     Web Site: www.bronord.com




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