Re: HELP! partition table messed up -- (DOS okay but linux is not!)
"Arup Mukherjee" <arup+@cmu.edu> wrote:
> I'm under the impression (from the debian fdisk man page, among other
> things) that DOS/W95 store a copy of the partition table in their boot
> sectors, and use its info in preference to that from the MBR. Assuming
> that's true, I'd just like to make the MBR consistent with what DOS
> and W95 already believe is the reality.
DOS and W95 do not store partition information in the boot sector. The
information you see in DOS fdisk is based on the partition table in the
MBR, nothing else. DOS does store filesystem information in it's boot
sector, and that includes the exact position _of that partition_.
I don't know what happened, but all this sounds like you have an older
version of Disk Manager or EZ-Drive installed. These programs are used
on systems with an older BIOS, that doesn't know the LBA or Large
translation mode for big harddisks (> 504 MB). It is software that is
installed in the MBR, and loads itself in memory at boot time, providing
a run-time translation of disk parameters. Linux will overwrite the
program and use it's own drivers. Later versions are recognised by
Linux, and then it will take over the translation, but older versions
had problems.
Gertjan.
--
Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl>
The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html
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