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). What does the kernel think the disk size is on bootup? dmesg | grep hdb What does the BIOS say in the CMOS setup screen for the disk geometry? What does the disk say on the label for the geometry?