In article <4031@sumax.seattleu.edu> boyer@sumax.seattleu.edu (Chuck Boyer) writes:
quoted text
>>The file system that Linux uses is not compatible with that of any
>>other operating system. 
> 
>Is this certain? Someone suggested in an earlier post or two that
>Linux was 'exactly' compatible with Minix (what version of Minix
>I do not know, I was going to ask). If this is true....

The filesystem is still pretty similar to minix: the only addition is
the symbolic links. If you do not use symlinks, minix and linux
filesystems are totally interchangeable. There are some very minor
differences: minix always clears the inode->mode word when it deletes an
inode, and linux doesn't, so minix fsck will report some spurious error
messages for linux partitions, but that's no big deal (you can make the
linux fdisk report the same errors with the "-m" flag).

quoted text
> >   Device      Major    Minor       Device      Major    Minor
> >   ------      -----    -----       ------      -----    -----
> >   /dev/hda1     3        1         /dev/hdb1     3        65
> >   /dev/hda2     3        2         /dev/hdb2     3        66
> 
>The copy of the rootimage0.95a that 'I' got from tsx-11.mit.edu
>had /dev/hdb1 as Minor 41, /dev/hdb2 as Minor 42, etc......
>What's up 'exactly'?!!!

Both are correct: it's decimal 65 and hex 41.  Use decimal numbers for
most things (ls -l does), but when giving the whole device number as
one, it's usually easier to use hex.  Thus /dev/hdb1 is (3,65) but also
0x0341 depending on what you want to do.

                        Linus