Determine contents of disk partition

[kep55]

I installed Linux onto my laptop to dual boot with Win7. Linux showed 8 partitions on the HDD which Win7 Disk Management confirmed. Only four of the partitions are named. How does one determine the contents of these other partitions?

 

[SkyNetRising]

How does one determine the contents of these other partitions?

Disk management shows file system used in partitions.
If file system is NTFS or FAT32, you can assign drive letter to partition and browse it's contents in windows.
If file system is some other type, then it's probably something linux specific and you can read it's contents from linux.

Edit: You can read FAT16 amd extFAT also from within windows.

 

[Luminary]

- What flavor of Linux are you running?

- Can you take a screenshot of either the Linux or Windows partition displays? We might be able to help identify a few for you.

Typically you'll get at least 4 new partitions created on a disk when you install Linux, a /boot, / (root), swap, and /home. Some flavours of linux (like CentOS/ Fedora) have these set up as logical volume groups so they look like /dev/mapper/cpuname-root.

So you have AT LEAST 2 partitions that Windows uses (a primary and backup), and normally at lest 4 Linux partitions.

If you want to poke around inside partitions within Linux you'll need to mount the partition to a valid mountpoint (ex. mount /dev/partitionname /mnt/point). From there you can browse through them in either your GUI file manager or the command line using 'cd'.

 

[kep55]

I solved the problem by going to each partition and assigning / mounting it as an active partition. Once that was done, I merged the partition into the primary partition. I got dot down to one partition, which unfortunately meant all my Win10 set up files were permanently and irretrievably deleted. My pappy always did say some good comes out of every tragedy.