Inside Ext2read
Next->Inside Hard Disk, previous-> Index
Every operating system provides facility for the persistent storage and management of data. Those data are stored in a container called files. For this purpose the operating system provides a file system that allows users to organize, manipulate and access the files.
To provide an efficient and convenient access to the files, the operating system imposes one or more file systems to allow data to be stored. Linux uses Ext2 (Second Extended File System) file system (it also supports tens of other file systems like fat, ntfs e.t.c.). Recently the ext2 file system has journaling support and called Ext3 file system (though the most data structures are same).
This tutorial will try to show you what is inside the hard disk. What is inside the Ext2/3 file system? And how our program works?
This part of the text will tell you the organization of the hard disk, how the partition information is stored in a dos/windows based systems. This text will also tell us how to retrieve the data from the disk and how ext2read does that.
This part of
the text will describe about the layout of the ext2/3 file systems and the data
structures it uses. We will also look how ext2read uses those data.