Ron....well, ok?! A couple of points. When I set up for my new
mdk 6.1 installation I only cleared the area I planned to use
with PM5 but didn't partition it. When disk druid made the
partitions it assigned the partitions as below:
Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1106 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 105 549 3574431 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 550 1106 4474102+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 1 104 835348+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 550 553 32098+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 554 570 136521 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda7 571 1106 4305388+ 83 Linux
...disk druid made a type 5 extended partition instead of the
type f that was created by PM4 (my fault, I let it happen) back
when I installed 6.1 (the end of September, I believe). There
was never any indication of trouble till Friday night when I
shut mandrake down to a restart and booted up on Win 98 (using
Boot magic), did a scan with my scanner and then shut windows
down to a restart and attempted to boot linux back up. It
refused to boot and never booted again. No warning, no
incorrect shutdown, just didn't boot any more.
As you said about your linux installations, my installation was
perfectly happy for three or so months till it quit booting.
Surface scans find nothing wrong with the drive either. So I
personally still suspect PM and the dos extended partition (my
fault for letting it happen. not paying enough attention to
details) that PM allowed me to create linux partitions within.
Thanks,
Alan
Ron Stodden wrote:
>
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Alan Shoemaker wrote:
>
> > But on the subsequent fdisk scans (after the corruption of the
> > partition table had occurred) I (finally) noticed that the
> > extended partitiion was a type f, instead of the proper type 5.
> > Type f is listed as 'Win95 Ext'd (LBA)', whereas a type 5 is
> > listed simply as 'Extended'.
> >
> > Anyway, I suspect that having 3 linux partitions inside a Win95
> > extended partition probably is what allowed my root partition to
> > get corrupted (I figure it was totally overwritten somehow, but
> > that's just a guess).
>
> Type f is normal for large disks - type 5 can't span them.
>
> I have numerous Mandrake installations on4 large disks set up by PM5 - all
> use Win95 Ext'd extended partitions and all my Linuxen are perfectly
> happy.
>
> So that isn't the problem.
>
> --
>
> Regards,
>
> Ron. [AU] - sent by Linux.
