Charles R. Anderson wrote:
On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 12:55:36AM -0400, Gregory Avedissian wrote:
The disk in question is around 30GB, and originally, 6 GB were taken by windows on hda1, 1GB by swap on hda2, 8GB for hda3, and 10GB for hda5, leaving 3.7GB unallocated space in the extended partition. I did this by making the win partition with the win98 fdisk, and then making the linux partitions with the suse intall disk. It looks like the numbers aren't adding up right.
Ok, you need to stop right here and find out why fdisk thinks the disk is only 9GB before doing anything else. I can think of one reason. The MBR also stores C/H/S values. Normally, C*H*S*512 on the MBR should match the disk capacity. Since yours doesn't appear to, perhaps you overwrote the MBR C/H/S values when you restored the copy you had in /boot. Did you perhaps make that backup from a different sized disk? Linux 2.4 will trust the MBR values over the BIOS values. Linux 2.6 trusts the BIOS over the MBR (leading to the aforementioned Windows interop problem after installing a Linux 2.6 distro).
I'm sure I made the backups from the right disk. This was about a week ago when I installed this drive, and it was the only harddrive in the machine at the time. Once I got everything installed and working, I made the backups with debug and in linux with dd. I have noticed on several previous linux installations that disk geometry reported by linux is accompanied by messages that say something like "this is not the geometry we expected." I always have ignored those messages, because everything was working. I thought that was normal, but if I'm doing something consistently wrong on installation, I'd like to know about it.
What does the kernel think the disk size is on bootup?
dmesg | grep hdb ide0: BM-DMA at 0xc000-0xc007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA hdb: IBM-DTLA-307030, ATA DISK drive hdb: attached ide-disk driver. hdb: host protected area => 1 hdb: 60036480 sectors (30739 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=3737/255/63, UDMA(100) hdb: hdb1
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
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 And here's more: DOS fdisk reports the partition as being 8032 MB. Win98 reports it (C:) as 5.8 GB. gnu parted reports it as: (note that the drive is temporarily connected as hdb for convenience) ide0: BM-DMA at 0xc000-0xc007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA hdb: IBM-DTLA-307030, ATA DISK drive hdb: attached ide-disk driver. hdb: host protected area => 1 hdb: 60036480 sectors (30739 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=3737/255/63, UDMA(100) hdb: hdb1 and here are the fdisk and sfdisk outputs again for reference: fdisk -l Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 1123 9020466 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) sfdisk -l Disk /dev/hdb: 1123 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 0+ 1122 1123- 9020466 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/hdb2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hdb3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hdb4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty