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I have my hard drive from my mac it has a boot camp patition, but the mac is dead. Ubutnu sees the partition, calling it /dev/sdc3 and reporting that it has a basic linux data partition. I tried to mount it with #mount /dev/sdc3 folder. But it told me I need to specify the partition type. ok. I went to #fdisk -l | grep sdc

and got

/dev/sdc3 * 72850 72863 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS

so then I tried:

# mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc3 folder
# mount -t hpfs /dev/sdc3 folder

both failed, telling me to look at dmesg | tail so heres that: [ 3408.950969] HPFS: Bad magic ... probably not HPFS

and the fail for ntfs:

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdc3 folder/

NTFS signature is missing.

sooo... what kind of partition is bootcamp? and how do I mount it?

j0h
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1 Answers1

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Apple's Boot Camp uses a hybrid MBR to help a BIOS-booted Windows coexist with an EFI-booted OS X. As noted on the linked-to page, hybrid MBRs are dangerous and trouble-prone. I suspect you may be running into a problem related to this. Your fdisk output seems to show the MBR side of things -- certainly the single line of output you've shown is consistent with either a pure MBR disk or a hybrid MBR, not with a pure GPT disk. (Hint: Don't be stingy with program output when posting questions; show the entire output of a command like fdisk -l /dev/sdc!)

One of the problems with hybrid MBRs is that the MBR and GPT sides can get out of sync. It's entirely possible that this has happened to you -- but that's speculative on my part. To know, you'd need to compare the start and end points of the GPT and MBR partition tables. To do this, run both gdisk -l /dev/sdc (to see the GPT side) and fdisk -l /dev/sdc (to see the MBR side), and compare the data.

Another possibility is that you're not accessing the correct partition. The MBR's /dev/sdc3 (which you've identified as being a Windows partition) may not be the same as the GPT's /dev/sdc3. This is a critical point because in Linux, the GPT side is what's used to create device identifiers, so when you tried to mount /dev/sdc3, you were probably mounting the GPT's /dev/sdc3, not the MBR's /dev/sdc3. (Of course, this assumes that the disk has a hybrid MBR, which isn't certain given the information you've presented, although I think it's likely.) Again, comparing the GPT and MBR data from gdisk and fdisk, respectively, will help you understand what's going on.

Rod Smith
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