[CentOS] CentOS 6 mount of ntfs formatted usb stick fails

Thu Apr 17 17:26:03 UTC 2014
Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net>

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/sdf1

That 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

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.