The Random Bit Bucket: Moinak Ghosh's Weblog

I have been playing around with some filesystem stuff on Solaris x86 lately in my free time and a bunch of things are brewing. While doing all this I constantly hit against the lack of a good partition table viewing tool. The standard fdisk just does not cut the ice. In addition I wanted to see all extended partitions as well since I intend to support accessing other filesystems on extended partitions. So I spent a couple of weekends and conjured up a utility to dump the entire x86 partition table in various formats - Philip Brown's getfdisk.c was my starting point. In addition mounting PCFS (FAT/FAT32) filesystems in extended partitions on OpenSolaris is tricky at the best due to the /dev/dsk/c*p0: format.

The utility has the ability to scan the partition table and generate appropriate device names that can be used with PCFS. The utility can be downloaded from: http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/FSWpart.tar.gz This is an SVR4 package so to install just untar the package and execute "pkgadd -d . FSWpart". Just run "prtpart" without arguments to dump the table. "prtpart -help" prints detailed help text on the options. There is no manpage as yet. This utility is still being worked on and a more finished version will be included in the next BeleniX release in addition with EXT2/3 and NTFS support without any kernel changes