Re: fdisk problem and general errors with installation
Hi,
>> That will install a Amiga RDB on the drive, so your PC style
>> partitions are lost (but not updated until reboot).
>>
>> > hdb1.........150Meg
>> > hdb2.........1350Meg
>> > hdb3.........500Meg
>> >
>> > These changes were saved to the drive with the w command.
>> > If I now mount the partitions, they come up with the old sizes, 1Gig,
>> > 500M, 500M. I don't know what this means. Are there two different
>> > partition tables on this disk somehow?
>>
>> As it says there on the screen, REBOOT.
>
>I don't understand. I did reboot after I saved the changes under fdisk,
>and when I remounted the partitions, they had the sizes of the PC
>partitions I had originally created. I'm not really concerned with this
OK, a few explanations (were the source with him, Goswin had not suggested
to just repartition with the Amiga fdisk :-):
The 'old partition info still present' mystery is because the PC partition table
is still present (as far as I remember, the RDB isn't placed in the first sector,
rather somewhere in the middle of the disk, smart choice back in the old times
when disk seeks were much slower). I might be wrong, but the behavior you
describe is suggestive of a 'spare' partition table.
The kernel (and that's all that counts here, as far as mounting partitions is
concerned) has a list of possible partition table formats it tries, and
it sees the PC partition table first, registers the partitions and dosn't care
about other partition tables. Why is this? Read the source, Luke. Hint: there's
a reason why atari_partition is tried last.
So the only thing you did by using amiga-fdisk was to write a new Amiga partition
table (aka RDB, I guess) somewhere, and this 'somewhere' will be cleaned up by
the next fsck in case you hit some filesystem data structures, otherwise the block
will be used as free. If you actually want to use the Amiga partition, wipe the
DOS partition table (just changing the partition signature 0xaa55 at offset 0x1fe).
The 'reboot' thing? Might just be that amiga-fdisk doesn't force the kernel to
reread the partition table after changing it (thereby newly recognizing the
changed partitions). Should have been fixed... Rebooting is the poor man's way of
rereading the partition table.
>right now though, my outstanding problem is getting X to work. I still
>have the entire archive in the form of .deb files that I can re-install.
>Could you give me a list of the bare essential files that are needed for
>X-windows? I'll try reinstalling them and give it another go...
xlib, xbase, xserver-fbdev and xfntbase should be sufficient.
Michael
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