cfdisk error: Writing partition table to disk...File size limit exceeded

[Dougie Nisbet <dougie@highmoor.co.uk>]

I deleted and recreated two partitions on /dev/hda. Things went ok for one of 
them, but now I find I can't do anything with cfdisk at all. Whenever I try 
and write the disk partition table, I get the error:

	 Writing partition table to disk...File size limit exceeded

The disk is a 40GB IBM Deskstar (dmesg output for disks at the end of this 
mail). I have one windows98 partition as /dev/hda1, the remaining partitions 
are ext2 and reiser. I've had this disk a long time, and not had any problems 
before. 

I've just noticed from the dmesg output that the disk geometry is different 
for /dev/hda - there are four identical disks so I've used cfdisk to correct 
the geometry on hda, and rebooted. The geometry now looks ok, but I still 
can't update the partition table. 

What's my problem?

Dougie

root@tbird2:~# df -hT
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8     ext2    463M  404M   35M  92% /
/dev/hda6     ext2    3.7G  908M  2.5G  26% /potato
/dev/hda7     ext2    1.4G  652k  1.3G   1% /tmp
/dev/hda9     ext2    2.8G  1.5G  1.1G  56% /usr
/dev/hda10    ext2    3.2G  1.7G  1.4G  53% /var
/dev/hda11    ext2    2.8G  1.2G  1.4G  45% /home
/dev/hda13
          reiserfs     11G  3.4G  7.2G  32% /development
/dev/hdb1 reiserfs     38G   29G   10G  74% /tbird6
/dev/hdc1 reiserfs     38G   36G  3.2G  92% /backups
/dev/hdd1 reiserfs     38G   27G   12G  68% /backups/guestw/mp3
/dev/hda1     vfat    6.0G  468M  5.5G   8% /98



Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hda: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdb: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdc: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdd: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hda: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=5005/255/63
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdb: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=79780/16/63
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdc: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=79780/16/63
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdd: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=79780/16/63