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Re: Warning about paritioning issues (was Re: Bug#28652: not a bug)



I had the following problem:

after some severe disk problems (i.e. crash) I started from the
beginning,
and installed a virgin 10GB disk as hda. I did not have Debian CDs
at hand
so I installed SuSe 5.2 with the following partitions:
  hda1  1023 kb  dos (fat16, iirc),  empty
  hda2  2023 kb  dos (fat16, iirc),  empty
  hda3  2023 kb  ext2  root partition
  hda5   128 kb  swap
  hda6  2023 kb  ext2  usr partition
  other partitions to fill up the disk
  cfdisk rounded the partitions to cylinder boundary
Suse installed fine but was not bootable from hd (non system disk)
so I gave up and got Debian 2.0 CD. I deleted all partitions and
remade everything. Reinstallation with that was successful, hd was
bootable and Debian ran fine.

After that I switched the 10 GB disk to hdb and tried old hd as
hda.
That booted into W95, which I upgraded to W98. I formatted both
dos
partitions on hdb (10 GB disk) (under W98, I think). The first
partition works fine but the second one is giving problems. It is
VERY
slow, and every time scandisk is run it found 1.5 MB worth of lost
files.
It also complains that FAT table and backup do not agree.
Reformatting the 2 GB dos partition in W98 complained about
corrupted
MBR.

In conclusion, think that combination of cfdisk and lilo can not
partition disk and create mbr in a way that is completely
acceptable
to W98. If there is a simple fix, like cfdisk offering to zero the
beginning of new dos partition, it should be implemented.
Otherwise
the situation should be clearly explained in installation docs,
like:
'If you think you will ever need a MS operating system in your box
you must install it firs, since Debian breaks the assumptions MS
does. This means your MS system will not work correctly.'

t.aa

"J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Nov 12, 1998 at 02:56:09PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> > Madarasz Gergely gave an excellent reason for this problem to occur and
> > since Ray apparently agrees with it (he hasn't complained for 2 weeks now)
> 
> I don't have enough data to disagree :-)
> 
> Seriously though, both Jano and I have systems that suffered from partition
> overlap syndrome; I just don't know how to determine for sure if Linux or
> Windows is to blame.
> 
> I surely hope that this will be mentioned in the installation document soon.
> 
> Ray


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