W95 Ext'd (LBA) Partition

This section provides a quick introduction on W95 Ext'd LBA (Windows 95 Extended Logical Block Addressing) Partition, which is actually a container to hold sub-partitions.

If you are using a hard disk create from a Windows computer, you may see a special partition with the "W95 Ext'd (LBA)" type. W95 Ext'd (LBA) stands for Windows 95 Extended Logical Block Addressing.

"W95 Ext'd LBA" is not a file system partition. It is actually a container to hold sub-partitions. On Windows systems, a hard disk can only be divided up to 4 partitions. "W95 Ext'd LBA" technology allows you create more sub-partitions from those 4 primary partitions.

If you see a hard disk that has more than 4 partitions, or you see a partition index higher than 4, you know that "W95 Ext'd LBA" is used on the hard disk.

For example, I have the following partitions on my CentOS computer:

herong$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 900.0 GiB
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *          2048  167776255  167774208    80G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2        167776256 1953523711 1785747456 851.5G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        167778304 1748721663 1580943360 753.9G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6       1748723712 1750820863    2097152     1G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7       1750822912 1953523711  202700800  96.7G 8e Linux LVM

The output tells me that:

So do not try to mount "W95 Ext'd LBA" formatted /dev/sda2 to Linux system, it is not a true file system.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction to Linux Systems

 Cockpit - Web Portal for Administrator

 Process Management

 Files and Directories

 Users and Groups

File Systems

 "df" - Display Free Space of File System

 Mount USB Drive as File System

 "dd" - Copy Data from/to Storage Devices

 Use "dd" Command to Test I/O Speed

 "du" - Display Disk Usage of Directories

 Mount Windows NTFS File System

 Access Persmissions on "ntfs-3g" File System

 Mount Windows Shared Folders

W95 Ext'd (LBA) Partition

 Reformat NTFS Partition into EXT4 Partition

 NFS (Network File System)

 Mount NFS (Network File System) on macOS

 /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab Files

 Unreachable Remote File Systems

 Block Devices and Partitions

 LVM (Logical Volume Manager)

 Installing CentOS

 SELinux - Security-Enhanced Linux

 Network Connection on CentOS

 Internet Networking Tools

 SSH Protocol and ssh/scp Commands

 Software Package Manager on CentOS - DNF and YUM

 vsftpd - Very Secure FTP Daemon

 Postfix - Mail Transport Agent (MTA)

 Dovecot - IMAP and POP3 Server

 Email Client Tools - Mail User Agents (MUA)

 LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)

 Administrative Tasks

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB