Re: Help! FAT magic number corrupted!
me said
> On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:
>
> and exits. fdisk /dev/hda1 won't give me a partition table because it's a
> dos disk.
>
Huh. Fdisk should be able to read the device regardless of what filesystem
types are on it. As far as I know all i386 systems build and use the
same partition table formats. Something else mst be up!
> > try cd'ing to the directory where /dev/hda3 is mounted and
> > chroot . bash
> >
> > this SHOULD give you a shell that can run those binaries.
> > (and its bash too ;))
>
> thanks, yes, this works, and i can run cfdisk fine. cfdisk works fine. I
> didn't change anything, but i tried to write the partition table, and
> here's the error cfdisk gives:
>
> "Wrote partition table, but re-read table failed. Reboot to update table."
>
Have you then rebooted to see if the write took place?
> This was what it gave me originally when this whole mess started.
>
> > have you tried fsck?
>
> e2fsck on my ext2 drives (/dev/hda3 et al) works fine. e2fsck on /dev/hda1
> of course doesn't work, because it's a non-ext2 partition. e2fsck on
> /dev/hda returns "Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
> e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda."
> <what's this superblock thing? I'm not up on the technical details of
> FATs.>
>
Right. /dev/hda represents the *entire* drive - /dev/hdax (where x is 1-?)
represents the various partitions. Avoid using fsck/mkfs on /dev/hda.
> fsck.msdos on /dev/hda returns:
> Currently, only 2 FATs are supported, not 243.
>
> fsck.msdos on /dev/hda1 returns:
> Currently, only 2 FATs are supported, not 81.
>
> Hmm. Why does it think I have 81 FATs on one partition?
>
> > As for the Win95 system...
> > you will probablky need to re-install
>
That goes without saying, doesn't it!? Everytime I've heard anyone talk
about fixing a win95 issue it always seems to start with "First re-install
the OS..."
> yep, i figured so. but right now I can't even get a Win95 boot floppy to
> recognize my C drive (aka /dev/hda1). <sigh>
> Could fips help me with that problem?
>
Remember, Microsoft fdisk's tend to change partion numbers around - what was
once /dev/hda2 could now be /dev/hda1 and vise-versa. I recommend creating
any MSDOS/Win9x partitions on the drive first using MS's fdisk and then using
Linux's fdisk/cfdisk to create the others. (after a re-boot of course...)
> Thanks so much. I feel kinda stupid for not having taken appropriate
> precautions, but i guess i'm learning the hard way... <sigh>
>
Many of us (myself included) have learned the same lesson the same way.
The secret is to do this only once. :)
> -Renee Landrum
> slandrum@cs.smith.edu (main) ----- southern_grrl@iname.com (forwarding)
>
>
Chuck
--
Chuck Stickelman, Owner E-Mail: <stick@richnet.net>
Practical Network Design Voice: +1-419-529-3841
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