Here's the update: Went into BIOS and set the disk to LBA. This resulted in sfdisk -l showing the same geometry as the kernel (CHS 3737/255/63) This put the start and end of the first partition at 0 and 1023. Somewhere along the line, my windows partition grew by 2GB. Is it possible that it's reading a previous partition table? Win98 was still showing c: to be 5.8GB, and dos fdisk was still showing it as 8.2 GB. So, I took Doug's advice and said a prayer, then went at it. Set the win partition back to 6GB with dos (win98) fdisk (with the drive hooked up as master.) This made windows unbootable, and fdisk /mbr didn't correct it. That's ok. I did have it working again until then, and I could have retrieved my data if I'd had any on that partition. Connected the drive as slave and put another drive I had with a non-critical linux installation on as hda (in case I screwed up and partitioned the wrong drive). Booted into linux and repartitioned with sfdisk /dev/hdb, putting in parameters for <start cylinder> <size in cylinders> <type> for each partition when promted: /dev/hdb1 0 765 c * /dev/hdb2 765 130 82 /dev/hdb3 896 1044 (L for linux is the default) /dev/hdb4 1941 1795 (tried both 85 for linux extended and 5 for win extended) /dev/hdb5 1941 1305 L /dev/hdb6 - it insisted on setting up hdb6, so I just hit enter, and let it take the rest of the disk. This was originally unpartitioned space. I then was able to mount /dev/hdb3 and access my root filesystem. I was not able to mount /dev/hdb5 to access my /home partition. Error message from mount was "wrong filesystem type or too many mounted filesystems). Unless someone knows the secret code to to mount a recovered logical partition, I'll assume that there's no easy way to do it and finish this project (i.e. wipe the disk and start over, without putting windows on this drive.) No more extended partitions for this boy. On a brighter note, I learned how to get windows98 to boot from the SECOND hard drive, and that gives me great satisfaction. It was way easier than I thought, and if anyone's interested, I'll give details. This means that when I figure out how to watch movies on dvd in linux, I can get rid of windows by simply removing the second drive. Thanks to all for your help with this. Greg Charles R. Anderson wrote:
On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 02:27:01PM -0400, Gregory Avedissian wrote:
What does the kernel think the disk size is on bootup?
hdb: 60036480 sectors (30739 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=3737/255/63, UDMA(100)
What does the BIOS say in the CMOS setup screen for the disk geometry?
capacity 30740 MB cylinder 59560 head 16 precomp 0 landing zone 59559 sector 63
The BIOS and kernel agree on the size of the disk. 59560/(255/16) = 3737 cylinders. I would however make sure the BIOS is set to LBA mode if it isn't, which should cause the heads to become 255.
What does the disk say on the label for the geometry?
Model: DTLA-307030 Capacity: 30.7 GB LBA 60.036.480 sectors CHS: 16383/16/63 MLC: F80033
Strange. That doesn't add up at all. Ah, here it is:
"There is an industry convention to give C/H/S=16383/16/63 for disks larger than 8.4 GB" [1]
And here's more: DOS fdisk reports the partition as being 8032 MB. Win98 reports it (C:) as 5.8 GB.
Interesting.
gnu parted reports it as: (note that the drive is temporarily connected as hdb for convenience) hdb: 60036480 sectors (30739 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=3737/255/63, UDMA(100)
Agrees with the kernel above.
sfdisk -l Disk /dev/hdb: 1123 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Here is the problem. sfdisk is seeing the wrong number geometry. I would attempt to fix the C/H/S values in the partition table with sfdisk. First I would read [1] in it's entirety--it goes into all the gory details of geometry and size limits.
Here are some useful documents on geometry and partitioning:
[1] http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/en-us/default.asp?url=/...
[3] http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us... _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug