MDK 10.1 Disk Geometry messed up, won't fix!

[Guest sarmadgilani]

Hi,

 

I installed MDK 10.1 onto some free space on my harddrive, and had the Mandrake installer create partitions for me in the free space.. and sure enough, I got bit by the so-called LBA bug where it messes up the partition table or something.. I can still boot into Mandrake just fine from my boot floppy that I made, and I want to just format my FAT32 C: partition and re-install windows, but I've got some serious partition problems.. and I don't know how to fix it!

 

PartitionMagic gives me a bunch of errors and doesn't show anything. In Mandrake, all my partitions mount and work fine, but fdisk and cfdisk work fine yet sfdisk doesn't. sfdisk gives me:

 

sfdisk: seek error: wanted 0x0000000000000000, got 0x0000000000000000

/dev/hda: unrecognized partition

No partitions found

 

fdisk and cfpart both show the disk geometry as 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9729 cylinders (80 GB drive). I am using LBA mode in my BIOS.

 

I booted up using Knoppix and sfdisk works, giving me this:

 

Disk /dev/hda: 9729 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.

DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.

Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

 

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System

/dev/hda1 * 0+ 4974- 4975- 39954568+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/hda2 4974+ 9728- 4755- 38193120 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/hda3 5484+ 5486- 2- 15120 e W95 FAT16 (LBA)

/dev/hda4 5486+ 5876- 391- 3137400 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/hda5 4974+ 5248- 275- 2207488+ 83 Linux

start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)

end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,239,63)

/dev/hda6 5248+ 5304- 56- 445504+ 82 Linux swap

start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,241,1)

end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,103,63)

/dev/hda7 5304+ 5484- 180- 1444432+ 83 Linux

start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,105,1)

end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,59,63)

/dev/hda8 5876+ 7520- 1645- 13207288+ b W95 FAT32

start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)

end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,239,63)

/dev/hda9 7520+ 9372- 1852- 14870488+ b W95 FAT32

start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)

end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,59,63)

/dev/hda10 9372+ 9728- 357- 2865208+ b W95 FAT32

start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)

end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,239,63)

 

It looks to my novice eyes like some partitions got set to 240 heads somehow.. I don't have any spare harddrive to backup my files too.. All my data from all partitions shows up in Linux, I'm hoping it's just the partition table that's messed up. What can I do to fix it? Please Help!

 

Sarmad.

Edited November 19, 2004 by sarmadgilani

[Guest sarmadgilani]

Ok, I went into cfdisk and told it to Write the partition table to disk. This fixed the CHS found errors I was getting in sfdisk, but I still have the problem:

 

Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.

 

Also PartitionMagic refuses to touch the drive, citing error #105 (about partitions not starting at a cylinder boundary). I feel like I'm so close.. is there a way I can fix this boundary problem? Thanks!!

 

Sarmad.

[aRTee]

That PM refuses is not a big issue; in general you cannot mix and match partitioning tools, you have to stick with one and the same.

 

PM once couldn't even clean up a drive, erase all partitions, for me - so I used one of the linux tools...

 

If you want to use PM, you have to use a linux live cdrom (or Mdk cd1 rescue mode) and delete all partitions, write the table to disk, and then use PM to do everything. After which you will always have to use PM..!

 

If at the stage you're at you can install and use win AND lin, you may not want to worry.

 

If you still can't use / install / run windows, do the partitioning anew with PM or (imho preferably) with fdisk (or the related tools, cfdisk or whatever) - for this you can use for instance the rescue mode of the Mandrake installation cd1: boot from cdrom, hit F1 and type 'rescue'.

Command line knowledge is required here, no graphics mode exists..!

And no manpages at that point - luckily fdisk has quite extensive help modes to remind you of the options - but not of which option you should use at what point....

[Guest jackrlewis]

Found a thread mentioning that sfdisk compiled under gcc 3.4.3 using default optimizations exposes a bug in sfdisk. Quickest cure is to grab sfdisk from Mandrake 9.x - you will find "sfdisk -l" works, where the 10.x version doesn't.

[scarecrow]

Partition Magic never, ever worked well with mixed windows and Linux filesystems.

You might want to give V-Com Partition Commander a try (although to my poor knowledge there's no demo available). Acronis Disk Director works decently too.

[pmpatrick]

This is quoted from an article in the Linux Journal:

 

1.Launch GNU Parted by typing parted /dev/hda. (Change /dev/hda to the device identifier for the hard disk you want to rescue.)

2.Type rescue start end, where start and end are the approximate start and end points of the partition. These points don’t need to be exact, and if in doubt, you should err on the side of making the space too large. If GNU Parted finds a filesystem in that area, it reports details and asks you if you want to create a partition for the filesystem. Respond affirmatively.

3.Repeat the previous step as necessary to recover all your partitions.

4.Exit from GNU Parted.

Unfortunately, GNU Parted’s rescue command is rather unreliable. Sometimes it works, but if you know the exact start and end points of the partitions you want to recover, you should use Linux’s fdisk instead — fdisk is much simpler and more reliable if you know the precise start and end points.

 

I'd give the link for the article but the site seems down now. The artilce was on emergency rescue and I have it copied locally.