fdisk, lilo problems
Yesterday and today, I brought up a new computer.
MSDOS 6.0 on /dev/hda1, Debian Linux on /dev/hda2.
In initializing the computer, the bios disk type auto-detect offered
me a choice of three options, as follows:
Options size cyls heads precomp landzone sectors mode
1(y) 515 1048 16 65535 1847 63 normal
2 515 524 32 0 1847 63 lba
3 515 524 32 65535 1847 63 large
Option 1 didn't work, option 2 did. I selected option 2 and
configured the system from there.
The disk was then partioned with one 254 MB DOS partition, using
MSDOS fdisk. MSDOS was then installed. Debian 0.93R6 was then
installed with fdisk being used in a shell dropout to create a
second partition for Linux and put an ext2 filesystem on it.
Once I got to the point of wanting to LILO the disk, LILO failed
with complaints about the second partition. Here's what fdisk v2.0d
from miscutils-1.3-5 says about the disk:
Script started on Tue Jan 9 12:52:26 1996
# fdisk /dev/hda
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 32 heads, 63 sectors, 524 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1 254 256000+ 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(507, 15, 63) logical=(253, 31, 63)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(507, 15, 63) should be (507, 31, 63)
/dev/hda2 509 255 524 272160 83 Linux native
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(508, 0, 1) logical=(254, 0, 1)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(1023, 15, 63) logical=(523, 31, 63)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 31, 63)
Command (m for help): q
# exit
Script done on Tue Jan 9 12:52:35 1996
I've upgraded fdisk, lilo, and sundry other stuff to recent packages
from the development tree with no apparent impact on this situation.
MSDOS fdisk has no complaints about the disk.
This appears to be a linux problem someplace, I'm guessing, since MSDOS
doesn't complain of any problems but Linux does. I wonder if I can
collect any further useful information from the system before I
try starting over from scratch.
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