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Bug#32269: partion harddisk fails if WIN95_EXTENDED present



Package: boot-floppies
Version: 2.1.5
Severity: grave

Trying to install by rescue-floppy on a new x86 with Win9X preformatted
harddisk fails:

Menu Partion hard disk gives:

FATAL ERROR: bad primary partition

which is identical to what cfdisk -P /dev/hda says.
It offers then to use cfdisk -z, since parttable may be corrupt or factory
clean, which is wrong. The reason seems to be, that cfdisk v0.8j
does not know about the new Win95 OSR2 (LBA) partition types, here 0x0f
being WIN95_EXTENDED (LBA). According to bug report #21779-done this is
fixed in cfdisk v0.8l included in util-linux_2.9g-1.

However "View part table" correctly displays:

hda1: FAT > 32M
hda2 Win95 Extended (LBA)

(This failed as well for the hamm boot floppies, guess you get this info
not via cfdisk anymore.)

My system is a PII 350, Auss P2B motherboard, Intel BX chipset, 
BIOS rev. 1.006 with extended int 13 services for  large disks. 
The EIDE drive is an IBM DTTA 351010 with 9.65 real GB in LBA mode.

I consider this bug "grave" since this should be a pretty common scenario
on new systems.: Win9X preinstalled and today's cheap >8GB hard disks.
It makes the whole installation process fail, at least for less
experienced users.

I tried now to switch to the other pseudo terminal and
use fdisk 2.1 (>4GB), however this reports:

------------------------
c=1024 / h=255 / s=63

Part 2 has different physical / logical endings:
phys = 1023 / 254 / 63        log = 1231 / 254 / 63
------------------------

While log is correct, I am unsure whether providing the "good" values
via kernel params would fix this *and* make fdisk do TheRightThing, e.g.
agree on geometry with Win9X. 

Proposed fix: use updated cfdisk / util-linux
              A newer fdisk v2.8 is available as well.

Regards,

Michael Taeschner


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