Re: cfdisk hates me ("FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends after end-of-disk"
Hopefully this isn't bad (what would make it no bad? oooh is this complicated, see doc
reference below). I also have one of these IBM disks which reports itself as being
8GB. If things are working for you then that's great. I'm currently only using 8GB of
mine for this same reason.
Why does the disk report itself as being 8GB? Because 8GB is the absolute limit which
is addressable using c/h/s as reported by INT 13 (1024 cylinders, 256 heads, 63
sectors). With LBA (logical block address) up to 137GB may be addressed. This answer
I'm sure raises more questions. The topic is a long and sordid piece of PC history.
There's an extensive doc on the subject at
ftp://ftp.wi.leidenuniv.nl/pub/faqs/bios.faq. Note that this document is a bit dated
and PC bioses have changed since the time of its writing.
Seth R Arnold wrote:
> Hey guys. I am a bit worried.
>
> cfdisk gives me this error:
> FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends after end-of-disk
>
> I, being one of the sort-of-cautious type, am scared.
>
> Here is a nice little output from df:
> amidala:/home/sarnold/redwood# df
> Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda6 13411348 1103240 11610889 9% /
> /dev/hda1 31077 1348 28125 5% /boot
>
> This is an ibm 14.4 gb hdd.
>
> From my /var/log/messages file:
> Sep 6 23:00:22 amidala kernel: hda: IBM-DTTA-371440, 7559MB w/462kB Cache,
> CHS=1757/255/63
>
> Since things mostly worked, and still mostly work, I sort of ignored this.
>
> Was this a Very Dumb Thing To Do?
>
> Please help me understand this. :)
--
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com
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