I now have four EIDE hard disks hanging off my onboard Promise controller.
The onboard VIA VT82C586 IDE interfaces are disabled in the BIOS, so the
disks on the Promise chip are seen as /dev/hd{a,b,c,d}. I also have an
IBM disk on the Adaptec 2940AU SCSI controller.
The first disk is for Windows: C is a1, D is a5... M is a14.
Second disk is Mandrake 8.1, 3rd 8.0, 4th Cooker. SCSI disk is spare
(empty) - I use that as an "inbetween" in Partition Magic to move
partitions around.
I use PowerQuest's Boot Manager as follows:
Disk 1 Primary 1 Windows
Disk 2 Primary 1 8.1 (/boot)
Disk 2 Primary 2 8.0 (/boot)
Disk 2 Primary 3 Cooker (/boot)
Now when I run HardDrake it says: "Error I can't read your partition
table, it's too corrupted for me :) I'll try to go on blanking bad
partitions".
Now this is scary. I run fdisk on every disk and fdisk doesn't have any
problems. I think this is the reason for my recent failures to upgrade
Cooker from hd.img, choosing "expert upgrade". Today expert upgrade
provoked the above error message and seemed to be offering to wipe all
the disks clean :-( So I went for expert install and here HardDrake
doesn't complain.
I can get the error message to go away by using fdisk to create primary
Linux partitions on Disks 3, 4 and the SCSI, and a logical Linux
partition in the extended partition of the SCSI disk.
Why, oh why does HardDrake interpret empty partitions as corrupt?
--
Peter Ruskin, Wrexham, Wales.
Registered Linux User No. 219434 ( see http://counter.li.org/ ).
Mandrake Linux release 8.1 (Vitamin) for i586
Kernel 2.4.8-34.1mdk-win4lin, XFree86 4.1.0, patch level 21mdk.
KDE: 2.2.2. Qt: 2.3.2. Uptime 0 hours 32 minutes.
------------------------------------------------------------------
