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Re: partition does not end on cylinder boundary error. FIXED



Hi,
On 21 Feb 2002, Shriram Shrikumar wrote:

> > So basically you ran partition magic, fixed the problem and now everything
> > works fine? Great. I became curious, so could you please send me another
> > fdisk -l an fdisk -l -u from your current situation? Let's see how it's
> > solved.
>
> fdisk -l /dev/hda
> Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2491 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1             1       158   1269103+   b  Win95 FAT32
> /dev/hda2           159       184    208845   83  Linux
was:
  /dev/hda1             1       158   1269103+   b  Win95 FAT32
  /dev/hda2           159       184    208845   83  Linux

>
> fdisk -l -u /dev/hda
> Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2491 cylinders
> Units = sectors of 1 * 512 bytes
>
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1            63   2538269   1269103+   b  Win95 FAT32
> /dev/hda2       2538270   2955959    208845   83  Linux
was:
  /dev/hda1            63   2538269   1269103+   b  Win95 FAT32
  /dev/hda2       2538270   2955959    208845   83  Linux

>
> I dont notice any diff between this and the one before.(v. strange) Then
> again, how can I get fdisk to display the CHS / LBA values (like pqmagic
> was talking about) ?
>
Me neither. I don't get what fdisk was complaning about.

> Looking at fdisk man,
>
> 	In  a DOS type partition table the starting offset and the
> 	size of each partition is stored in two ways: as an  abso­
> 	lute  number of sectors (given in 32 bits) and as a Cylin­
> 	ders/Heads/Sectors triple (given in 10+8+6 bits). The for­
> 	mer  is  OK - with 512-byte sectors this will work up to 2
> 	TB. The latter has two different problems. First  of  all,
> 	these  C/H/S  fields can be filled only when the number of
> 	heads and the number of sectors per track are known.  Sec­
> 	ondly,  even  if we know what these numbers should be, the
> 	24 bits that are available do not suffice.  DOS uses C/H/S
> 	only, Windows uses both, Linux never uses C/H/S.
>
> I suppose this explains the problem I have been having - I guess fdisk
> doesn't need the C/H/S values and therefore maybe doesn't have much
> facility to change just there values.
>
Yes, I guess (careful: *wild guess*) that the partition table is stored in
two ways (as the above explanaion says) and that Linux only uses one, but
informs you if the other is incorrect (that is, CHS). But because it does
not matter for Linux, there is no need to change it.

But DOS does. Blah!

> Learn something new EVERY day. The only diff between what you learn
> about linux and windoze is that - the more you learn about windoze, the
> more you tend to dislike it and the more you learn about linux - the
> more you like Linux (and dislike windows)
>

<little story>
When I was playing around with the kernel config, I noticed that it was
possible to read an Amiga formatted harddisk. Being an Amiga fan, I sure
wanted to try it. So I connected my harddisk and everything went fine.
For some reason, I started windoze to do some other shit, but upon
reconnecting my harddisk to my Amiga, it was unable to read from it.
Darmed, darmed, darmed. So I formatted and reinstalled my 180 sized 880kB
disks backup.

Later I read something in a document that it is hazardus to start windoze
with an Amiga harddisk connected. Windoze does not recognize the partition
table (Amiga has a Rigid Disk Block) so it just wrote a couple of bytes to
head of the disk. And that caused the problem! Darmed windoze, don't
interfere with things that are beyond your imagination.

But the document also described that it wrote to a harmless location,
Linux still would have been able to read the disk, but my Amiga did not
recognize the RDB anymore. A simple dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hdc seek=..
skip=.. would have solved the problem.

But I already had reinstalled the disk. That was the first moment I was
really amazed how severe  damage a windoze os could do.
</not so little story after all>

Greetz,
Sebastiaan




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