[Tfug] Weird partition type

[Stephen Hooper]

On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 17:30 -0700, Benjamin Krein wrote:
> Thanks for any other ideas you guys have!

Not really an idea, but I was curious so I started digging around on
Google:

Here seems to be an explanation of what "plaintext" is:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0503.2/0399.html

from discussion:

--
What to do afterwards? Last year I made a hack, reserving type 88 hex
for a Linux plaintext partition table. You must be able to find the
kernel patch somewhere on Google, otherwise ask. No fdisk required, the
partition table is just plaintext that you edit using emacs or vi.
The idea here is to use an ordinary DOS-type partition table for the
start of the disk, and let the type 88 partition describe the rest.

--

He is using it here to get around a limitation that BIOS partitions
suffer from (2TB who knew?).

So maybe what it is, a partition that contains a plain text file
describing layout, followed by multiple "sub-partitions" described by
the "layout" all contained within a single "real" partition?  That is me
guessing.

Maybe you could try pulling the first 1000 bytes or so with "less" or
"od", and see if it makes sense?

If you can make sense of it, then maybe some losetup options ("offset")
could help you.