Dianne Marie Montesa wrote: >hi db > >it seems that your partition table is already fscked >up ... i would suggest *really* zapping the boot >sector (usually sector 1) that contains partition and >booting info about your disk. > >to delete info on your boot sector as if your disk is >new, boot on rescue mode: > >dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=100000 > >where /dev/hda should be replaced with your device. i >dont know how many blocks/sector so to make it safe i >use count=100000. usually that does it for me. > >after zapping the boot sector, recreate the partitions >and reformat. > >hth >dm =) > >
The other possibility is that you tried to make more than three primaries plus an extended or you tried to make one of the extended the linux extended (085) type which is actually a pointer to an extension chain from one of the primaries. NEVER use 085. It probably shouldn't even be there and there used to be ways to crash diskdrake and fdisk by using it wrongly, but instal team closed those off after they were pointed out and QA assessed what was happening. OK lets look at the nuts and bolts of partition tables for a moment sector 0--the Master Boot Record (MBR) on a dos-patrition disk has the last 66 bytes as 4 - 16 byte fields plus two signature bytes for validity checking. Each field has the Cylinder,Head, and sector number for the partition it points to plus the number of cylinders in the partition. There are ONLY FOUR ENTRIES possible. Suppose you make 3 entries for primary partitions and you still have many partitions to make. You make the fourth (and diskdrake does this trnsparently) the rextended partition, which means that a bit is set so the reading system says "this points to a sector out on disk where further information is available". OK once you get there to that sector, in the last 66 bytes there will be TWO partition table entries. The first says where the extension partition is and what its size is and the second points to another sector where additional partitioning information is available. In other words you have an extension chain. It is possible to have more than one extension chain, but that is strictly for experts. Windows stops looking down the chain as soon as it sees a non-windows partition, so it is possible to hide an already existing windows extended partition from windows by putting partitions in between (diskdrake tries to keep partitions on the disk in partition number order). I hope this helps. Civileme > > >--- db <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>I have been struggling with getting two linux's >>(Mandrake 8.1 & RH 5.1) set >>up on my machine and have been back and forth so >>many times on the >>partitioning of this drive that apparently I filled >>up the partition table >>or something ... it won't let me finish any >>partitioning now ...when I try >>to go to the formatting stage following diskdrake, >>its gives me an error >>message: >>raw_add: partition table full. I tried rebooting >>and starting over but >>still the same message. Does anyon have any idea of >>what has gone wrong or >>how to fix it? >> >> >>>Want to buy your Pack or Services from >>> >MandrakeSoft? > >>Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com >> > > > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more >http://games.yahoo.com/ > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? >Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com >
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
