Package: testdisk
Version: 6.11-2
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
Scanning a suspect drive, 'testdisk' shows:
Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 128 (FAT) != 255 (HD)
It's advising changing one disk geometry variable somewhere, but the
error is vague.
Suggested remedy, more specific errors, e.g.:
Geometry mismatch: /dev/sdd has 255 heads; /dev/sdd2 incorrectly set
to 128 heads.
Detailed notes for leisurely maintainers (stop here if not) or curious/kvetching
users:
A user might wonder:
1) Which number is incorrect, 128 or 255?
2) Is it possible that both numbers are incorrect?
(As might be if both numbers were read off a
disk with bad data.)
3) Is "128 (FAT)" derived from the first sector of the
hard disk, or the first sector of a partition?
a) The first sector of which partition?
4) Is the "255 (HD)" derived from the first sector of the
hard disk, or the hard drive's BIOS?
Similar errors are shown in a .GIF file that comes with 'testdisk':
/usr/share/doc/testdisk/html/geometry.gif
Run through an OCR (the spacing is off) shows:
...
Disk /dev/sdd - 36 GB / 34 GiB - CHS 4773 240 63
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 255 (NTPS) != 240 (HD)
1 P HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 2370 104 63 35840952 [Volume]
Warning: Bad ending head (CHS and LBA don't match)
Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 255 (NTPS) != 240 (HD)
2 P HPFS - NTFS 2370 105 1 4772 179 63 36322965 [Drive_K]
Warning: Bad ending head (CHS and LBA don't match)
No partition is bootable
...
Here the line spacing and multiple errors visually implies the following
lines' partitions are the ones in question.
When there's only one error, but many partitions, the implication
becomes vaguer. If the error is on the first partition, the
user might be unsure which of the following partitions
is faulty. If the error appears between partitions the user might
not be sure which was faulty, despite the line spacing.
At least one other user seems confused by the error message:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/recovering-data-using-testdisk-769014/
The only docs that mention the error message are in German:
% find /usr/share/doc/testdisk/ | xargs zgrep --files-with-matches
'Incorrect number'
/usr/share/doc/testdisk/html/hinweise_und_tipps.html
Hope this helps...
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 3.1.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) (ignored: LC_ALL set to C)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages testdisk depends on:
ii e2fslibs 1.42-1
ii libc6 2.13-21
ii libcomerr2 1.42-1
ii libjpeg62 6b1-2
ii libncursesw5 5.9-4
ii libntfs10 2.0.0-1+b1
ii libuuid1 2.20.1-1
testdisk recommends no packages.
testdisk suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
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