Re: problems with partitions?

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
Tue, 25 Jun 1996 23:28:21 +0200


Marty Leisner:

: I have a 4 gig hawk...It has all linux partitions.

: I don't recall this when I created the partitions, now I'm getting:

: leisner@pb;fdisk -v
: fdisk version 3.04 (aeb@cwi.nl, 960119)
: leisner@pb;fdisk -l /dev/sda

: Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 522 cylinders
: Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

: Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
: /dev/sda1 0+ 127- 128- 1026596 83 Linux native
: start: (c,h,s) expected (0,0,63) found (0,1,1)
: end: (c,h,s) expected (127,206,21) found (248,132,62)
: /dev/sda2 127+ 382- 256- 2049131 5 DOS Extended
: start: (c,h,s) expected (127,206,22) found (249,0,1)
: end: (c,h,s) expected (382,233,7) found (745,132,62)
: partition ends on cylinder 745, beyond the end of the disk
: /dev/sda3 382+ 447- 65- 515375 83 Linux native
: /dev/sda4 447+ 522- 75- 601958 83 Linux native
: /dev/sda5 127+ 191- 65- 515344 83 Linux native
: /dev/sda6 191+ 256- 65- 515344 83 Linux native
: /dev/sda7 256+ 281- 26- 206119 83 Linux native
: /dev/sda8 281+ 333- 52- 416392 83 Linux native

[errors removed for clarity]

Clearly, fdisk 3.04 sees things like the kernel does. All is well.
However, the (c,h,s) triples, that are not used by the kernel,
were written by someone who had a different idea about the geometry.
There has been a time that a guess by scsicam_bios_param() was used
instead of what the SCSI controller reported, maybe you got this
during those times.

: I'm not sure what this means or if I will have a problem.

You might have a problem with LILO.
You might have a problem if you run DOS on some partition.

: Is there any HOWTO documentation I should read?

I think the various fdisk's are fairly well documented.
You might try to read and understand those docs.

: It currently appears to be working fine.

Good.

Andries