Re: Phantom partition, anyone?
On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 16:15, Gabriel Farrell wrote:
> At some point a little while ago I started getting the following
> message at boot time:
>
> [/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /shome] fsck.ext3 -a -C0 /dev/hda3
> fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short
> read while trying to open /dev/hda3
> Could this be a zero-length partition?
> fsck died with exit status 8
>
> The booting up of my machine (unstable on a Thinkpad x31) stops there,
> and I'm told to manually fix the partition table. If I don't do
> anything, and Ctrl-D to exit the repair shell, bootup continues and
> everything seems to work fine.
>
> If I print the partition table in fdisk I get (notice how hda3
> overlaps hda5 and hda6):
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hda1 * 1 665 5027368+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda2 666 1569 6834240 83 Linux
> /dev/hda3 1570 5168 27208440 5 Extended
> /dev/hda5 1570 1724 1171768+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
> /dev/hda6 1725 5168 26036608+ 83 Linux
>
> In cfdisk, however, the partition table looks like this (notice the
> lack of an hda3):
>
> Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> hda1 Boot Primary NTFS 5148.06
> hda2 Primary Linux ext3 [/] 6998.27
> hda5 Logical Linux swap / Solaris 1199.93
> hda6 Logical Linux ext3 [/home] 26661.52
>
> I never created an hda3 during installation, and I don't know where it
> came from. I'm tempted to just delete it, but I'm afraid that would
> cause irreperable damage.
A standard partition table supports only four partitions.
In order to allow for more than four partitions, some
partitions are subdivided. The subdivided partitions
are called extended partitions.
hda3 CONTAINS hda5 and hda6. fdisk is showing the detailed
breakdown. cfdisk hides the breakdown and hides hda3 along
with it. cfdisk allows you to create partitions without
worrying about the limit of four partitions. cfdisk handles
the housekeeping chores related to primary and extended
partitions for you.
--Mike Bird
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