Re: partitions do not end on cylinder boundaries
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Rick Dooling wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I had Windows XP on a ThinkPad T40. I used partition
> magic 8 to create a 20 gig empty partition at the end
> of logical drive E before installing Debian Etch.
>
> Installation went fine. I can boot to both Windows XP
> and Debian. Everything appears to work fine, but I get
> horrible warnings if I try to start partition magic.
>
> And when I run fdisk -l inside Debian Etch,
> I get this:
>
> Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
> 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 155061 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id
> System
> /dev/hda1 * 1 71835 36204808+ 7
> HPFS/NTFS
> Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
> /dev/hda2 71836 110384 19428224 f
> W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
> /dev/hda3 110384 155056 22515097+ 83
> Linux
> Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
> /dev/hda5 71836 92160 10243768+ 7
> HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda6 92161 108360 8164768+ 7
> HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda7 108376 110384 1012063+ 82
> Linux swap / Solaris
>
> I don't care about running partition magic or dos
> fdisk. I don't feel like repartitioning. Is it somehow
> unstable if I just continue using mainly Etch and boot
> occasionally into Windows for the odd program?
>
> On other threads I've seen people say that Linux
> doesn't care about the cylinder boundaries. True, or
> will I eventually have problems even if I don't
> repartition?
AFAIK, everything will work fine.
Quote from http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-2.html
>The Head value of CHS begin is not 0 or 1. PartitionMagic expects all
>FAT, HPFS and NTFS partitions to start and end on cylinder boundaries.
>(Comment: Windows NT on Alpha does not comply with this rule, and can
>create partitions starting on arbitrary sectors. There is no known
>operating system that requires this restriction. However, there exists
>software that tries to guess the disk geometry by looking at the CHS
>start and end values in a partition table. Note that with large disks
>CHS values are entirely meaningless.)
Still, I would recommend that you request your money back and use a
decent free program like gparted to do the partitioning. Explain that
the product is defective because it creates invalid partitions, and show
them the error you see.
- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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