I'm learning file system recently. wikipedia says the partition table is located at 0x01BE, but when I check my USB drive(NTFS) by a binary tool, there are some words there "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart". It doesn't look like partition table. Why? Where is the partition table?
1 Answer
A picture says more than a thousand words..
64 bytes at offset 0x01BE (446), with room for 4 entries of 16 bytes each. In this case only one entry is used to define a GPT Protective Partition as the partitions are actually defined in the GUID partition table (GPT).
Same sector interpreted as partition table:
This EE type partition typically occupies the entire drive or the 4 bytes for LBA sectors is maxed out (0xFFFFFFFF - 4294967295 - 2TB) as we see on this 4 TB drive so that 'legacy' partition tools and editors perceive the drive as fully allocated. And this is also where the '2 TB' maximum partition size for legacy/MBR partition tables originates.
An awesome resource for this type of stuff is the "The Starman", https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/GPT.htm.
/dev/sdc
)? Or the partition (in Linux like/dev/sdc1
)?