rootfs procedure sda, sda1 and sda5

Guest

During procedure for carry out rootfs specifically step for inserting USB stick the following shows up on the serial termina:

root@Omega-xxxx:/dev# [  906.330000] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-platform
[  906.480000] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[  906.500000] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[  907.500000] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     HP       v100w            1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[  907.510000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 3913664 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 GB/1.86 GiB)
[  907.510000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[  907.520000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 32 07 03 f0
[  907.520000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[  907.530000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[  907.540000]  sda: sda1 < sda5 >
[  907.550000] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk
What I would like to draw your attention to is the line showing "sda: sda1<sda5> and when listing the dir of /dev the same items:
root@Omega-xxxx:/dev# ls /dev
bus                 mtd1ro              mtdblock3           sda1
console             mtd2                mtdblock4           sda5
cpu_dma_latency     mtd2ro              mtdblock5           shm
full                mtd3                network_latency     snd
i2c-0               mtd3ro              network_throughput  tty
kmsg                mtd4                null                ttyATH0
log                 mtd4ro              port                ttyS0
mem                 mtd5                ppp                 urandom
memory_bandwidth    mtd5ro              ptmx                watchdog
mtd0                mtdblock0           pts                 zero
mtd0ro              mtdblock1           random
mtd1                mtdblock2           sda

In this directory appears to be three sda, sda1 and sda5. Why is sd5 showing up and how does this affect the mount procedure?

Boken Lin

Hi @Guest, the reason that three devices show up is because your drive is partitioned into 2 partitions. sda is the physical drive, sda1 and sda5 are two partitions within sda. When you are setting up the mounting procedure, you can choose to mount both sda1 or sda5 or one of them.

Guest

Does agree with our description of the partitions? Ran fdisk -l and got:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1944 1950751+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 2 1944 1950720 83 Linux

As you can see the sda5 does show up?
Also why is the win95 portion showing up? Reformatted using Minitool Partition on Windows machine.
Don't have a unix box setup.
And attempting to use mkfs.ext x /dev/sdax fails to work

Guest

FYI If you use Minitool Partition for Windows it will, when you format the USB stick to type ext4, create sda1 as Win95 Ext'd partition.