PBone wrote:
>
> I have a new dual boot system with a 30GB IBM 75GXP HDD. I used Diskdrake to
> partition the drive. Windows98 crashed about once a week and on reboot it
> tells me that it can't access the end of my second windows partition. This is
> 9.9GB and is vfat (but not LBA). When I run scandisk normally it reports no
> problem. I haven't noticed any other problems- Linux is yet to crash on me on
> this system.
>
> Should I be worried?
> Should the second partiton be LBA?
> How do I do it? (I don't have any of the commercial partition managers)
You are confused. Logical Block Addressing (LBA) applies at the
physical disk drive level, NOT the partition level. For a 30GB
disk, I would say that LBA is compulsory, otherwise you won't be able
to get to the full 30GB.
Your PC BIOS will tell you whether this drive was set up LBA when it
was installed. The PC BIOS also lets you change the mapping
algorithm from normal to large to LBA. BUT, changing this value
will have no effect if the drive has any partitions on it - it must
be totally empty, for obvious reasons.
LBA is actually set and implemented in the drive itself, so Linux,
which does not use the PC BIOS, knows about it and reports on the
kernel boot-up (run dmesg to see it again).
DiscDrake has reported problems and is too new to be depended upon.
It is an unfinished work in progress, but with great promise.
Partition Magic is the way to go, because it is the only partitioner
that works properly in both Windows and Linux ext2 systems and has
been in the market long enough to get the bugs out.
--
Regards,
Ron. [AU]
