| Author | Message | ||
     nicolas mella (Nmella) |
Hi, Has anyone a template for understanding UFS boot partitions? Thanks, Nicolas | ||
| Jens Kirschner (Admin3) |
This is rather a over-simplification. What exactly is it you would expect from that template? You cannot seriously expect a template to be able to parse a whole partition and give you everything. This isn't even possible with the simplest file systems (read: FAT). Additionally, UFS is not a common ground, it's a name that is used for many varying (though related) file systems used by different vendors - each creating its own flavor. Since you mention "boot": There is very likely a boot block beginning at sector 0 that is only used for boot partitions, but its contents are very likely not influenced by the file system used. For example, an Ext or Reiser partition will provide a boot area (beginning at sector 0) but the contents will be written by LILO or GRUB or whichever boot loader is installed. I would expect something similar for any other UNIX file system as well. You would need a boot loader template to understand that boot sector. On the other hand, the partition as such, booting or not, will have a superblock, which contains basic information like number of inodes (UFS uses inodes as does Ext, but Reiser doesn't), number of blocks, blocksize, etc. The task would be to find a layout definition for your specific flavor of UFS and the position at which the superblock can be found. This varies greatly: 1k for Ext, 64k for Reiser. I have read somewhere, it is 8k for UFS, but that may have been just one implementation. As far as understanding the partition goes, you'll probably need some insight into the underlying concepts: With Ext, for example, it is stored nowhere, but inode 2 is the root directory by convention. Knowing that helps, as, I am sure, there is a lot of "convention" used by UFS. Look at WinHex's Ext-Templates to see what to expect. Ext and UFS are sort of related. |