Mail Archives: cygwin/2013/01/08/10:38:59
On 01/08/2013 04:14 PM, Warren Young wrote:
> On 1/8/2013 06:59, bartels wrote:
>>
>> The windows format.com
>
> format.com hasn't existed since the DOS days. That includes the DOS-based versions of Windows, up through Windows ME. Under NT-derived
> versions of Windows, "format" is a built-in command in cmd.exe.
That may very well be true, but I have a friend called locate:
$ locate format.com
/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/format.com
/cygdrive/c/Windows/SysWOW64/format.com
/cygdrive/c/Windows/winsxs/amd64_microsoft-windows-format_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_827dd459a3aa9980/format.com
/cygdrive/c/Windows/winsxs/x86_microsoft-windows-format_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_265f38d5eb4d284a/format.com
And it even seems to work ;-)
>
> > claims the fs is write protected, but I hope dd
>> can help out.
>
> It's worth a try, but if I had to take a blind bet on it, I'd say you're going to find that dd will give the same result. Cygwin is
> essentially a user-level process. If cmd.exe cannot do a thing, dd.exe probably can't, either.
>
> It is *possible* that unmounting the filesystem with the taskbar button will let you write to the raw device. But Windows being Windows, it's
> possible that will make it disappear from the system entirely, too.
I cannot touch the gui.
It may not be necessary, as format.com has a /x feature.
>
>> The mtab is not very helpful:
>
> That's because Cygwin proper does not mount local filesystems. The Cygwin mount table just shows you Cygwin-specific mappings that it has
> added on top of what the underlying NT kernel has done.
Okay, I see.
>> My question is this: which device in /dev do I use?
>
> According to [this][1] it's probably /dev/sdb. But please do read through what I pointed you to first, and check its applicability carefully
> before attempting this.
'Probably' is not good enough when the goal is targeted destruction :)
I need a solid automated procedure to locate my device.
$ cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name
8 0 732574584 sda
8 1 104391 sda1
8 2 245063542 sda2
8 16 976762584 sdb
8 17 102400 sdb1
8 18 976657408 sdb2
8 32 4882808320 sdc
8 33 131072 sdc1
8 34 4882675712 sdc2
8 48 3909092 sdd
8 49 3909091 sdd1
8 64 7566844 sde
8 65 7566016 sde1
8 80 31590400 sdf
8 81 31590400 sdf1
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
C:/cygwin/bin 932G 62G 871G 7% /usr/bin
C:/cygwin/lib 932G 62G 871G 7% /usr/lib
C:/cygwin 932G 62G 871G 7% /
C: 932G 62G 871G 7% /cygdrive/c
D: 31G 31G 0 100% /cygdrive/d
E: 102M 30M 73M 30% /cygdrive/e
F: 234G 137G 98G 59% /cygdrive/f
K: 3.8G 616M 3.2G 17% /cygdrive/k
O: 4.6T 1.7T 3.0T 36% /cygdrive/o
X: 3.1G 3.1G 0 100% /cygdrive/x
Y: 4.6T 1.7T 3.0T 36% /cygdrive/y
Z: 7.3G 46M 7.2G 1% /cygdrive/z
>
> [1] http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-posixdevices
Yeah, I had a look see on that page before and it is not all that helpful, for reasons you explained.
Does windows leave a trail when mounting?
Prospects are not good without it.
Thanks for the help.
- bartels
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