Posts Tagged ‘Hard Disk’

How to mount a partition on a disk that has an EFI GPT partition table in Linux

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How to mount a partition from a large disk (above 1TB) that has an EFI GPT partition table instead of the conventional MBR (Master Boot Record) partition table. A large disk means a hard drive that is 1 Terabyte or more. EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface. GPT is short for Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table.

GUID_Partition_Table_Scheme

First Step)
Check the kernel was compiled with EFI support. The standard kernel with Ubuntu/Debian/CentOSĀ  5+ comes with EFI support built-in

cat /boot/config-2.6.26-2-686 | grep EFI

(Change the version number with yours in /boot/config-*)
if the kernel was compiled with EFI support if you get these lines:

CONFIG_EFI=y
CONFIG_FB_EFI=y
CONFIG_EFI_VARS=m
CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y

Then type

fdisk -l

(to check the device name in /dev)

fdisk -l /dev/sda

(if the device is at sda, replace with the one you saw when you typed fdisk -l)

parted /dev/sda print

Ok we got the filesystem with the above command, now lets mount it!

mkdir /mnt/test
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt/test

(if the file system is ext3, it will be displayed when you type “parted /dev/sda print”, if device is at /dev/sda)

Hope this helps