Other Reviewing a pile of disks

cracauer@ · 2026-04-17T17:37:41+0100

balanga said:
I suspect that in reality it is an HPFS partition.

Well, then file -s it. What are you waiting for?

balanga · 2026-04-17T18:53:55+0100

cracauer@ said:
Well, then file -s it. What are you waiting for?

I doubt whether file recognises hpfs.

This from a disk that actually has OS/2 installed and I can boot from it.

Code:

=>       63  625142385  da0  MBR  (298G)
         63      15057    2  !10  [active]  (7.4M)
      15120    4097520    3  !23  (2.0G)
    4112640  621023760    1  ntfs  (296G)
  625136400       6048       - free -  (3.0M)

And just to confirm...

 

file -s /dev/da0s1

Code:

/dev/da0s1: DOS/MBR boot sector, code offset 0x54+2, OEM-ID "IBM 4.50", Media descriptor 0xf8, sectors/track 63, heads 240, hidden sectors 4112640, sectors 621023760 (volumes > 32 MB), reserved 0x80, serial number 0xca64d5be, label: "           ", FAT (1Y bit by descriptor); NTFS, sectors/track 63, physical drive 0xbe298080, sectors 13264085, $MFT start cluster 5064860730931544064, $MFTMirror start cluster 35322350018643, clusters/RecordSegment 0, serial number 01f

balanga · 2026-04-17T19:02:35+0100

Zare said:
Some details - HPFS is not NTFS, no OS/2 or win32 Windows have NTFS root support.
The Jan 1998 dating of the laptop aligns with 4GB HDD size, but it is a possibility Windows 2000 or NT4 have been installed at some point.

HPFS predates NTFS and AFAIK NTFS was designed around NTFS. IBM and Miicrosoft jointly developed HPFS.

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