Bug#327333: installation: sparc installer puts incorrect geometry into partition table
Package: installation
Severity: important
After installing debian sarge on a solaris 9 box, in a dual boot setup,
I find that the debian installer has made solaris 9 non-bootable.
Solaris complains that the physical geometry of the disk does not match
that recorded in the disklabel, and panics. Further, format (the solaris
fdisk utility) refuses to read the disklabel, and will only reset it,
destroying all solaris and linux partitions.
The problem seems to be the two 16bit integers in the partition table
field, offset 0x1a6 and 0x1b0, which the debian installer changes
to be 2 more than the solaris installer.
I think the installer should only modify the values, if the disklabel is
blank.
This is an 18gig disk btw.
Warning: don't use a hex editor to edit the partition table, like I did,
as there is a checksum. If the checksum is wrong OpenBoot will not boot
anything.
I am aware that technically this is a solaris problem. It seems very
fussy about the fields in the parition table, however debian should
co-exist with solaris as well as it can.
A hex dump of the broken and good parition tables follows:
od -A x -x brokenpartitiontable
000000 4942 4d2d 4444 5953 2d54 3138 3335 304d
000010 2d53 3830 4420 6379 6c20 3134 3937 3020
000020 616c 7420 3220 6864 2036 2073 6563 2033
000030 3939 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
000040 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
000080 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000 0008 0002
000090 0000 0003 0000 0005 0000 0083 0000 0000
0000a0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000b0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 600d deee
0000c0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0001a0 0000 0000 2710 3a7e 0000 0000 0000 0001
0001b0 3a7c 0002 0006 018f 0000 0000 0000 25f2
0001c0 00bf ffd0 0000 0000 0040 094a 0000 0000
0001d0 0222 eb98 0000 06d9 00b2 cfe6 0000 0000
0001e0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0001f0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 dabe e29a
000200
od -A x -x okparitiontable
000000 4942 4d2d 4444 5953 2d54 3138 3335 304d
000010 2d53 3830 4420 6379 6c20 3134 3937 3020
000020 616c 7420 3220 6864 2036 2073 6563 2033
000030 3939 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
000040 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
000080 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000 0008 0002
000090 0000 0003 0001 0005 0001 0083 0000 0000
0000a0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000b0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 600d deee
0000c0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0001a0 0000 0000 2710 3a7c 0000 0000 0000 0001
0001b0 3a7a 0002 0006 018f 0000 0000 0000 25f2
0001c0 00bf ffd0 0000 0000 0040 094a 0000 0000
0001d0 0222 d8e4 0000 06d9 00b2 cfe6 0000 06d9
0001e0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0001f0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 dabe d73b
000200
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: sparc (sparc64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-sparc64
Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
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