Re: cfdisk big-disk warning
Duggan Dieterly said:
> while cfdisk will work with big disks, it will not work with the
> partition table created by windows 98. in order to use partitoions bigger
> than 2GB with windows 98, you must use the FAT32 partition scheme.
Again, it seemed to work fine for me. On an ~8 Gb drive with (IIRC) 1043
cylinders, I had the whole thing formatted out as a single FAT32 partition.
The version of cfdisk on the Debian install disks reported the drive as
having a corrupt partition table, but the current Potato cfdisk displayed it
just fine. I used Partition Magic to shrink the Win98 partition and free up
some space at the end. The current cfdisk then allowed me to create a
partition in that space and wrote out the partition table. (It also allowed
me to go back a little later and delete that partition.) I didn't use
cfdisk to create or modify the Win98 partition, which may well be relevant,
but I did use it to modify a partition table including an over-2GB FAT32
partition and Win98 still boots and runs off that partition without any
problems at all.
> i could not get cfdisk to work with
> this partition table when i went to create linux partitions on my disk.
> fdisk did work with the windows 98 FAT32 partition table.
Oddly enough, I tried fdisk on that drive before bringing out cfdisk (it
was actually unintentional; I'd assumed that 'fdisk' would be symlinked to
cfdisk) and fdisk refused to have anything to do with it.
> so, i conclude, and i've heard from others on this group, that cfdisk will
> not work in this case. if you don't need a dual boot system, then cfdisk
> will work fine with big disks. just change the disk geometry in expert mode.
> in fdisk or cfdisk.
Maybe you're using the same version of cfdisk as the Debian install disks?
I didn't have to go into expert mode or deal with disk geometry directly at
all.
> as far as the swap partition problem goes, i'm not sure. did you make sure
> that you changed the id to the swap id on the partition (82, i think)?
Yep, it was set as Linux swap. And don't forget that mke2fs refused to
deal with the higher cylinders (on that machine's other hard drive) too. I
wasn't able to put either data or swap out beyond cylinder 1023.
> did you initialize the swap space?
Isn't that what mkswap does?
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