On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Slosh wrote:
> Some information from fdisk -l
>
>
> Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 7476 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hda1 * 1 1275 10241406 7 HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda2 1276 2812 12337951+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
> phys=(1023, 0, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63)
> /dev/hda3 2812 7476 37471581 b Win95 FAT32
> /dev/hda5 1276 2681 11293663+ 83 Linux
> /dev/hda6 2682 2811 1044193+ 82 Linux swap
>
> Now is there a way to fix this?... Truth be told I'm not sure what the Win95
> Ext'd (LBA) part is... AFAIK I have three partitions, Windows XP (I'm
> assuming the HPFS/NTFS), RedHat 9.0 (I'm assuming Linux and Linux swap) and
> a Common partition (again assuming the Win95 FAT32)
>
I stand to be corrected, but my interpretation is this.
A partition must start when all the heads are at the start of a track
(cylinder boundary). As there are many (logical) heads reading different
layers of recording material (platters) this happens every 16065 * 512
bytes (~8.2 MB). If a partition does not end on one of these boundaries
then the space between the end of the partition and the start of the next
cylinder boundary is lost. In short you have lost up to 8 MB of space and
appart from this you have nothing to worry about.
Win 95 uses the dos fat32 fs which has been tweeked to read large HDDs
with LBA. It is not partitulary good as a fs hence it not finishing on a
cyclinder boundary. The same thing has happened to me and the fix was to
partition the HD with cfdisk, set the fat32 partition and format it with
dos/win95 later. This meant that the partitions started and finished on
cylinder boundaries.
Phil.
--
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