Michael F. Robbins on Thu, 12 Sep 2002 23:20:09 +0200


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PLUG] fdisk partition problem


On Wed, 2002-09-11 at 23:40, Doug Crompton wrote:
> The bios and SuSe's hardware probe show
> them to both be the same - 16, 63, 38792

See what the kernel IDE driver thinks: 
dmesg | grep ^hda
(or whatever disk it is)

> Ok so I changed the number of heads and cylinders in fdisk.

You can change the C/H/S values in fdisk?  This doesn't seem like such a
good idea, as they probably won't be interpreted correctly somewhere in
the BIOS or ATA bus.

> I setup all
> the partitions. It looks right - same as hda - I write it. I come back
> into Fdisk and it has the heads and cylinders screwed up again and thus
> the partitions are not right.

Probably because changing those values inside fdisk doesn't actually
change it on the disk.

I had a very similar problem with two identical Maxtor drives a while
ago.  The problem was that the BIOS was autodetecting one with LBA, and
the second without LBA.  (Not that the drives had/lacked support for
LBA, as this is a BIOS feature and is not seen by the drive, but the
BIOS chose to use it for only one drive and not the other.)  I had to
disable BIOS autodetection of the drives and set it manually, and it's
worked fine since.

Michael F. Robbins
mike@gamerack.com


_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group        --       http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug