a question about filesystems

[ES Rossiter]

> However,
> when I look at the partition in Windows Explorer, it lists the filesystem
as
> RAW. Anyone have any idea what this is? >

Hi Eric,

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws2/doc/rawdisk_ws_linux.html

Raw Disks
A raw disk is a physical IDE or SCSI disk that your host operating system
knows about. For example, with Linux as the host operating system, the IDE
raw disks are /dev/hda through /dev/hdh. The SCSI raw disks are /dev/sda
through /dev/sdp.

http://master-www.linuxrouter.org:8080/floppy.shtml

RAW - That is you dd the kernel right to the disk starting at sector 0. You
then dd the compressed root right behind the kernel and rdev the kernel to
tell it where to find the root on the disk. This will afford you the most
room on the disk, since it is raw and contains no filesystem at all. It is
not fun to work with, requires dd and rdev to make changes, and also the
built in boot sector of the kernel may fail in some combinations of
hardware.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/SCSI-2.4-HOWTO/rawdev.html

A raw device can be bound to an existing block device (e.g. a disk) and be
used to perform "raw" IO with that existing block device. Such "raw" IO
bypasses the caching that is normally associated with block devices. Hence a
raw device offers a more "direct" route to the physical device and allows an
application more control over the timing of IO to that physical device. This
makes raw devices suitable for complex applications like Database Management
Systems that typically do their own caching.

http://www.fors.com/orasupp/unix/37914_1.HTM

A raw device, also known as a raw partition, is a disk partition that is
   not mounted and written to via the UNIX filesystem, but is accessed via
   a character-special device driver; it is up to the application how the
   data is written, since there is no filesystem to do this on the
   application's behalf.

HTH,

Eric