fdisk fails on a new pentium
Hi, all.
I've got one of Bruce's "Gold" CDs and I attempted to install Debian
from it for the first time on a friends machine that wanted to
check out Linux. He has a rather new Intel PCI motherboard with
a 120 Mhz chip. This board is one that has a lot of stuff integrated
on the mother board. HD/FD/serial/parallel/game/mouse all on the
mother board. The hard drive is a new Seagate 1.08 fast ata
drive. It is the only hard drive and had previously been partitioned
by DOS 6.22 into 5 equal partitions. I attemped to delete the
last partition and remake it into a couple of Linux partitions.
cfdisk (I think) is what the menu uses and all went well until
I tried to write the partition back out. It hung the machine.
I rebooted and, sure enough, it didn't write anything out. I then
tried to do it again, but I deleted the last DOS partition and
created a small Linux partition at the beginning of the deleted
DOS partition. It also hung the machine trying to write the partition
table. I noticed that the powersaver features were turned on, so
the last time I repartioned, I did it real fast, so the disk wouldn't
power down. I didn't know how well Debian would handle the disk
being powered down.
So I rebooted and got out of the menu and ran "fdisk". Fdisk did
nothing. It was as if I typed "cat". I could see what I was typeing
but it never did anything. I couldn't ^C out of it. Nothing worked.
I then rebooted and brought up DOS and Windows. They were working
fine.
Does anyone have a clue as to why I couldn't write the partition table
out? Why did fdisk hang?
Thanks,
Jim.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Lynch, Sales Analyst, Cray Research, Inc. / ARS: K4GVO
Southeast District, Phone: (770) 631-2254, Email: jwl@cray.com
Suite 270, 200 Westpark Drive, Peachtree City, GA 30269
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