Re: 2.2.x corruption solved (Was Re: Statically linked 'tar')

[Martin Lucina <mato@nz.eds.com>]

On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 03:21:52PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> After some time the kernel crashed and I destroyed all partitions of my
> hard disk. _all_. Note that the partition table was still fine. Only the
> contents of the partitons (superblocks mainly) was completly screwed up.

Same story in my case.

> So this is a warning for people having partition c stopping before one of
> your partition. fdisk is right about partition c. Trust its end and not
> what fdisk suggests as end of other partitions.
> 
> I think the fix is simply a -1 in some line of fdisk... Looks like a
> silly/typo bug. I cc'ed to the author of the bsdlabel in our fdisk. If he
> can't fix that I can do that myself.

Agreed. It's not by far the only bug though. There are at least another two I
recall. First, have you tried editing any disklabels with fdisk? Generally
after deleting say the 'b' and 'e' partitions from a disklabel with 'a' to 'f'
and then trying to add them back in will completely screw fdisks calculations
and it will become impossible to write out a correct disklabel. I had to redo
the disklabel from the beginning a couple of times before I worked this out.

Second, it is a well known problem that either fdisk or the kernel (I think
it's just a missed out call to ioctl() in fdisk) will not re-scan the
disklabel after writing it, thus people have to reboot before it is
recognised.

Martin