On 04/17/2014 12:26 PM, Robert Nichols wrote:
On 04/16/2014 11:05 PM, Rob Kampen wrote:
when I tried dd if=/dev/sdf of=somefile count=100 i get:
somefile: x86 boot sector, Microsoft Windows XP MBR, Serial 0xc3072e18; partition 1: ID=0x7, starthead 0, startsector 8064, 15626368 sectors, code offset 0xc0
still not much wiser I'm afraid. My understanding of the MBR is rough, certainly insufficient to debug this. the frustration is that windoze is quite happy to mount and read it just fine.
It appears that someone took an _image_ of a full 8GB partitioned device with a standard DOS MBR and stuffed that into _one_partition_ of this USB stick. You should be able to access it in Linux by running (as root):
kpartx -a -v /dev/sdf1That should respond with "add map sdf1p1 ...", and you can then mount device /dev/mapper/sdf1p1.
You should run "kpartx -d /dev/sdf1" to delete that mapping before removing the device.
BTW, the "file" command will look inside block devices if you use the "-s" (--special-files) flag. It doesn't do that by default because reading some types of special files can have unexpected effects. You can also use the "-k" (--keep-going) flag to get more information than the first match.
file -s -k /dev/sdf1
OUCH!! Forget most of that. I misread your "dd" command as reading from /dev/sdf1 instead of /dev/sdf, since the former was what you had been asked to do. The comment about the "file" command still applies, though. What does the "file" command have to say about /dev/sdf1 (or a copy of the beginning sectors thereof)?