Harddisk messed up?

[aRTee]

hda: win2k on C: and another fat32 partition (E:)

hdd: hdd1 16GB fat32, hdd5 130GB fat32

no hdb, and hdc is the cdrw (liteon 40x24x16x or so)

 

system: nforce2 based, T-bird 1.4GHz, GF5xxxFX

 

 

Installation of Mandrake 10.0 OE, 4cd version.

 

- made hdd1 into 5GB / (hdd1), 1GB swap (hdd5), 5GB /mnt/altroot (hdd7), 5GB /home (hdd8); hdd5 got renumbered to hdd6 in the process.

 

- during the install, the machine froze (no moving mouse, no way to switch with ctrl-alt-F1,2,3) several times, forcing to start anew.

Not at the same point either - first time after inserting second cd, second time a couple of minutes after starting the installation (of the packages after selecting)...

After 4 retries, we managed. We did set the bios to all correct options as I know them, including LBA for the second harddrive.

- installed bootloader onto a floppy - in the summary, before it jumped the bootloader section - not good Mandrake...

 

- finally the install went through, and we got to boot into a nice desktop, etcetc.

 

- 2 more crashes when fiddling and showing the stuff that got installed, installed the nvidia driver (the guy was quite impressed with only 1 reboot ... plus the unscheduled ones... and with all the software installed - had his daughters play frozen-bubble "daddy can we get this on our machine too?" - get them while they're young I'd say... works wonders.. unpolluted minds...) installed some stuff from urpmi, after setting up plf and contrib...

 

- windows still booted fine, but did still show D: which was the hdd1 from before the install - and it wouldn't read from / write to it, told us it would have to format it first....

 

 

Later came back here to find I should have used the boot options noapic nolapic...

Told the guy, was happy with the info; I explained how to boot with those options, and how to put it in lilo.conf too.

 

Anyway, today the guy tells me that all files on hdd6, all 60+GB of stuff, got lost.

He had started emule on Wednesday everning when I left, on windows, and yesterday evening returned to find it showed a popup: unable to write to drive F: (hdd6)..

Rebooted, and guess what: windows started checking and repairing drive F.... Lost of fragments etcetc.... loads of .chk files, no filenames or dates, some are text some are movie files, some still open/play (he has to guess from the filesize to open them with mediaplayer or rar or whatever) some don't...

 

 

 

So, is this related to the same problem that sometimes makes windows not boot?

Note: the drive was not on LBA when doing the partitioning step (only did it once, after that we just selected 'use existing partitions').

 

Also, is the 'visibility' of drive D (hdd1) in windows also related?

Should we try the fix as explained below?

 

Basically, it could be that the partition table in the MBR cannot be read properly by windows, so it can still see drive D (hdd1).....?

 

 

Advice please!

 

 

 

 

Official bugreport from here:

http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7959

 

------- Additional Comment #21 From Pascal Rigaux 2004-03-18 00:50 -------

 

At last someone here reproduced the bug which is now fully explored.

 

Part of the reason I could not understand the bug, is that I could not

believe windows XP was still using the error prone int13 function 2

(CHS based) instead of the (available everywhere for some time) int13

function 0x42. Under linux, grub and lilo only use function 2 when

function 0x42 fails (they don't even ask the BIOS if it manages 0x42

since some BIOS don't report correctly having this functionality, cf

FORCE_LBA in grub)

 

The other reason is that I thought BIOS faking heads number (the

so-called LBA mode) was a choice independant of the content of the

drive. This is wrong, the BIOS tries to adapt its mode based on the

partition table [1]

 

So here is what happened:

- kernel 2.6 doesn't try to give the logical geometry, and gives the

  physical geometry instead [2]

- diskdrake uses the physical geometry to generate the CHS information

  (which is a broken duplicate of the linear sector number)

- the BIOS sees the partition table uses a different CHS geometry, and

  adapt to it

- ... and Windows computes the CHS to read its stage1.5 based on the

  previous geometry that it keeps in its boot sector. Alas the CHS

  doesn't get the same sector and Windows's boot dies (with very bad

  error detection) [3]

 

Bug occurence: the pb only occurs when you modify the partition table,

  since otherwise diskdrake won't write it.

 

Code fix description: inspired by the way new fdisk and parted detects

  the logical geometry based on the partition table [4]. parted code

  is especially quite robust.

 

  The fix is now included in cooker (DrakX #1.912), so:

 

  I still would like to access the BIOS geometry, esp. for empty

  partition tables. But kernel 2.6 doesn't give us this

  (/sys/firmware/edd/int13_dev80/default_heads is plain wrong on a box

  here)

 

Known workaround: forcing LBA mode in the BIOS

 

Fixing partition table:

  with diskdrake from drakxtools-10-24mdk do

    % diskdrake --change-geometry=hda=255,63

  where

  - you replace hda with your drive device

  - if Windows still fails, try adapting 255,63 to your drive LBA

    emulation. For this, see what is the geometry your BIOS gives when

    forcing LBA emulation

 

[1] http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/ker...311.3/1142.html

[2] http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/ker...311.3/0898.html

[3] http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/ker...311.3/1029.html

[4] http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/ker...311.3/1164.html

[Technonoid]

Basically, it could be that the partition table in the MBR cannot be read properly by windows, so it can still see drive D (hdd1).....?

I've had this happen a couple of times, even with a totally different hardware configuration. I ended up deleteing all linux partitions, then made sure windoze could see all fat32 partitions. Then reinstalled MDK, seemed like in both cases, the 2nd time was a charm.

One time though, I had to use Partition Magic to get a couple of the fat32 partitions fixed, then things went well. I can't really explain why though. :unsure:

 

So, how are things now? Its been 5 days since your post.