cfdisk error: Writing partition table to disk...File size limit exceeded

[Dougie Nisbet]

I deleted and recreated two partitions on /dev/hda. Things went ok for one of 
them, but now I find I can't do anything with cfdisk at all. Whenever I try 
and write the disk partition table, I get the error:

 Writing partition table to disk...File size limit exceeded

The disk is a 40GB IBM Deskstar (dmesg output for disks at the end of this 
mail). I have one windows98 partition as /dev/hda1, the remaining partitions 
are ext2 and reiser. I've had this disk a long time, and not had any problems 
before. 

I've just noticed from the dmesg output that the disk geometry is different 
for /dev/hda - there are four identical disks so I've used cfdisk to correct 
the geometry on hda, and rebooted. The geometry now looks ok, but I still 
can't update the partition table. 

What's my problem?

Dougie

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# df -hT
FilesystemTypeSize  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8 ext2463M  404M   35M  92% /
/dev/hda6 ext23.7G  908M  2.5G  26% /potato
/dev/hda7 ext21.4G  652k  1.3G   1% /tmp
/dev/hda9 ext22.8G  1.5G  1.1G  56% /usr
/dev/hda10ext23.2G  1.7G  1.4G  53% /var
/dev/hda11ext22.8G  1.2G  1.4G  45% /home
/dev/hda13
  reiserfs 11G  3.4G  7.2G  32% /development
/dev/hdb1 reiserfs 38G   29G   10G  74% /tbird6
/dev/hdc1 reiserfs 38G   36G  3.2G  92% /backups
/dev/hdd1 reiserfs 38G   27G   12G  68% /backups/guestw/mp3
/dev/hda1 vfat6.0G  468M  5.5G   8% /98



Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hda: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdb: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdc: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdd: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hda: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=5005/255/63
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdb: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=79780/16/63
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdc: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=79780/16/63
Feb 18 09:58:35 tbird2 kernel: hdd: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/380KiB 
Cache, CHS=79780/16/63

Re: cfdisk error: Writing partition table to disk...File size limit exceeded

[Dougie Nisbet]

Further to this, I've been having a look back through the archives, and I've 
decided to bring my kernel to a newer version and check again. I'm running 
woody on 2.4.14SMP at the moment, so I'll bring it up to 2.4.17.

The strange thing is that I've never had any problems before. I've seen a few 
references to people having problems with file sizes greater than 2GB, but 
this is the first time I've hit any problems, so I must assume that one of 
the apt-get upgrade dist-upgrade sessions I've run, or something else I've 
done on the box, has broken something.

Dougie