Robert G. Siebeck wrote: >The only thing which seems strange is an error thrown by fdisk: > > ># fdisk /dev/hda > >The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 116280. >There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, >and could in certain setups cause problems with: >1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) >2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs > (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) > >Command (m for help): p > >Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes >16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 116280 cylinders >Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System >/dev/hda1 1 130 65488+ 83 Linux >Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. >/dev/hda2 131 79717 40111848 5 Extended >Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. >/dev/hda3 * 79718 95960 8186314+ a5 FreeBSD >Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary. >/dev/hda4 95964 116279 10239264 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) >Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary. >/dev/hda5 2212 79717 39063024 83 Linux >/dev/hda6 131 2211 1048792+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris > > >
Technically, there is no "error" here. The first message is completely normal for large disks. The "does not end on..." messages mean that the disk was originally parititoned in "LBA" mode (which represents the disk as having 255 heads, and about 1/4 as many cylinders), but for some reason, Linux is seeing the disk in non-LBA mode. (side note: I really don't understand why BIOSs don't provide an option that says "Force the damn disk to LBA!!!") Again, nothing actually wrong with this, but if you were to delete and recreate any partitions with fdisk, it would insist on creatin the partitions on a cylinder boundary, meaning they start/end sectors would *not* be the same. So, if you see such messages, either be prepared to delete the entire table and start over, or don't change anything with fdisk! >cfdisk doesn't even start but stops with the following message: > >FATAL ERROR: Bad logical partition 6: enlarged logical partitions overlap >Press any key to exit cfdisk > > > Well, this is most likely because it is extremely rare to have logical volumes out of order in the extended volume. So the sanity checks in cfdisk might be fairly simple, like making sure the start cylinder of hda6 comes after the end cylinder of hda5. Sounds like a bug in cfdisk if you ask me.... I think the only way to really get rid of the error messages would be to do a full backup, then blow everything away, and then restore it. Probably not worth the effort though... -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
