Harddrive woes
I'm helping a friend set up Debian as a firewall/router for his
LAN. Troubles with the partition table or BIOS or something.
fdisk sez:
/root# fdisk /dev/hda
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 32 heads, 63 sectors, 823 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 82 82120+ 82 Linux swap
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(162, 15, 63) logical=(81, 15, 63)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(162, 15, 63) should be (162, 31, 63)
/dev/hda2 * 82 824 747936 83 Linux
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(163, 0, 1) logical=(81, 16, 1)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(821, 15, 63) logical=(823, 15, 63)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(821, 15, 63) should be (821, 31, 63)
We also formatted and mounted a second drive, cp -ax over /,
and fdisk says samilar things when that drive is installed
as hda. Seems to me the trouble is with lilo and perhaps something
it's using in /boot (boot.b?) to write the MBR. Lilo is
writing to the MBR of /hda rather than writing to hda2 and making the
second partition active with fdisk because lilo says it
can't write to hda2 because physical \= logical beginning
of the partition.
We tried 'fdisk /MBR' to wipe the MBR from a dos boot disk; booted
with startup floppy to root=/dev/hda2. Again, can't write with
lilo to /dev/hda2 because of faulty geometry info. Write to /dev/hda
and fdisk whines again.
Also tried too many other things to list. I fear things are
getting more fscked up as we go along. I have not run into this
before and I've slogged through the /usr/doc/lilo docs and
done the usual net searches without luck.
I'm stuck. If anyone is willing to help with this will send
any further info required.
Rick
--
r3ck@home.com
rick@vcn.bc.ca
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/~rick
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