Re: [newbie] cylinders, sectors and heads trouble
On Sunday 09 June 2002 15:33, you wrote: I have the same MoBo as you but with the raid controller which I disable in bios. I am curious , what is a WD drive, IDE or Scsi ?, my mobo sees my drive correctly, but then the size is never as much as the manufacturers claim . I wonder whether this WD drive of yours needs something to enable your OS to recognise it properly.Do mandrake or linux have any websites on the subject. The extended Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary: phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63) happened to me when I too used more that one partition tool, and it was one of the reasons why I bought partition magic to do all my partitioning and I noticed it makes a better job of measuring h s c so that when you choose a partition size it goes for the nearest neat ending in h s c, but I don't think it has to be PM ,any good partitioning tool will do so long as you stick to it. These are only my personal impressions and I cannot say other people have confirmed it, but if I can avoid it I no longer use the old dos fdisk, it is behind the times, especially with the larger modern hard drives. John On Sunday 09 June 2002 06:55, etharp wrote: more info about the new MOBO is in order, in particular the IDE controller (is it a HPT win-RAID?) No, I stay clear of the raid controllers... The MSI k7T266 pro2 comes in different flavours and I chose the one which doesn't have any raid controllers. On the motherboard, I have: Primary master: the wd drive, /dev/hde secondary master: a DVD drive, /dev/hdg I also have a PCI controller card and on it I have: primary master: an old IBM hard drive for backups: /dev/hda primary slave: zip drive: /dev/hdb secondary master: CD-writer: /dev/hdc-- /dev/scd0 A correction to the c,h,s count in the bios: it is (19158, 16, 255). Narfi. On Saturday 08 June 2002 10:57 pm, Narfi wrote: In my previous life, I was young and ignorant and I bought a WD drive! ... well, I'm at least not young anymore .-) I installed mdk on this second harddrive of mine and the setup was with (cylinders, heads, sectors,) = (77545, 16, 63) However, after I moved the hard drive to a my new motherboard and installed mdk 8.2, fdisk and diskdrake report the geometry as (c,h,s) = (4865, 255, 63) and fdisk warns that partitions do not end on cylinder boundaries. Can I still use diskdrake to create new partitions on this hard drive? I tried to put a section into lilo.conf: [this is the disk in question. Nevertheless it is on the primary ide0 controller:] disk=/dev/hde sectors=63 heads = 16 cylinders = 774545 But this didn't change the way fdisk and diskdrake saw the drive geometry. If I go into the bios, the geometry is listed with heads = 16 and cylinders some value 4 thousand something (sorry, forgot to write down!) I have lba32 in /etc/lilo.conf and I do not share this hard drive with any other OS. Does anyone have any suggestions? Resize the partitions to conform with heads = 255 using ext2online perhaps??? thanks, Narfi. mobo: MSI k7t266 pro2 /dev/hde: WD400BB fdisk -l /dev/hde Disk /dev/hde: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes Device BootStart EndBlocks Id System /dev/hde1 * 164511528+ 83 Linux Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary: phys=(1014, 15, 63) should be (1014, 254, 63) /dev/hde264 3844 30359448 85 Linux extended Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary: phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63) /dev/hde56496255496+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hde696 478 3071848+ 83 Linux /dev/hde7 478 1116 5119600+ 83 Linux /dev/hde8 1116 2901 14335744+ 83 Linux /dev/hde9 2901 3155 2047720+ 83 Linux /dev/hde10 3155 3206409216+ 83 Linux /dev/hde11 3206 3844 5119600+ 83 Linux -- John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] cylinders, sectors and heads trouble: Solved
On Monday 10 June 2002 01:26, you wrote: As I said previously, I had problems with my western digital hard drive. fdisk complained: Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary Previously, I had tried to put this information in the header of lilo.conf: install=/boot/boot.b vga=normal keytable=/boot/us.klt lba32 disk=/dev/hda bios=0x81 disk=/dev/hde bios=0x80 sectors = 53 heads = 16 cylinders = 77545 but that change never seemed to take effect so I deleted those 3 lines. Now I added a parameter in the append line in /etc/lilo.conf: append=hde=77545,16,63 and I believe this has the effect that I so much desired. At least fdisk does not complain any more. Who knows why this was needed? Maybe the hardware supplies the incorrect values, maybe the bios supplies the incorrect values. Or, perhaps, because there is already confusion about the bios code for /dev/hda and /dev/hde [see bios=0x81 and bios=0x80 above], the numbers for sectors and heads on /dev/hde are the numbers for a different drive! Narfi. Well I find that interesting, I do not see why Western Digital hardrives should work any different from anyone else's hard drives, as far as size and allocation of h s c is concerned. I have the same MoBo as you except I have RAID but I turn it off in Bios, so any explanation for this apparent quirk is something I want to know about as much as you. Have you ever had trouble getting this WD hard drive recognised on any other MoBo. As far as the other problem goes , the not ending on cylinder boundaryis concerned it is almost certainly something to do with using mixed partition tools, my experience is that they don't go together well. However overall, I think it just means left as it is you will have a small pece of hardrive going to waste that's all, When this started to happen to me I bought Partition Magic and started completely again, and touch wood I have not had any problems so far. It does not matter if you choose to format with different formatting tools so long as all the partitions are created by the one partition tool.However PM does a very though job of checking your drive for bad sectors,marking them, and formatting, if you choose so to do . It is slow, but I fully accept that , why not let it do it's job carefully and precisely, you just set up the programme , go away for a while and come back an hour or so later and all is done beautifully. You can then get on and install operating systems. John -- John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] cylinders, sectors and heads trouble: Solved
On Monday 10 June 2002 05:53, you wrote: On Monday 10 June 2002 01:26, you wrote: As I said previously, I had problems with my western digital hard drive. fdisk complained: Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary Previously, I had tried to put this information in the header of lilo.conf: install=/boot/boot.b vga=normal keytable=/boot/us.klt lba32 disk=/dev/hda bios=0x81 disk=/dev/hde bios=0x80 sectors = 53 heads = 16 cylinders = 77545 but that change never seemed to take effect so I deleted those 3 lines. Now I added a parameter in the append line in /etc/lilo.conf: append=hde=77545,16,63 and I believe this has the effect that I so much desired. At least fdisk does not complain any more. Who knows why this was needed? Maybe the hardware supplies the incorrect values, maybe the bios supplies the incorrect values. Or, perhaps, because there is already confusion about the bios code for /dev/hda and /dev/hde [see bios=0x81 and bios=0x80 above], the numbers for sectors and heads on /dev/hde are the numbers for a different drive! Narfi. Well I find that interesting, I do not see why Western Digital hardrives should work any different from anyone else's hard drives, as far as size and allocation of h s c is concerned. I don't think it does. It's just a piece of junk as we have often discussed here on the list, that's all. [See Civileme's posts for that] so any explanation for this apparent quirk is something I want to know about as much as you. See my explanations above and the large disk howto, e.g. sections 14.1 and 14.2. file:///usr/share/doc/HOWTO/HTML/en/Large-Disk-HOWTO-14.html As far as the other problem goes , the not ending on cylinder boundaryis concerned it is almost certainly something to do with using mixed partition tools, my experience is that they don't go There was just the one problem: I created all my partitions on my old motherboard with c, s, h = (x, y, z). When I moved it to my new motherboard, Mandrake didn't think it was (x, y, z) any more. Thus, I pretty soon figured out that I just wanted the c, s, h to be read again as (x, y, z) and I had to figure out how to change that. This doesn't have anything to do with what partitioning tool I've been using. All my partitions were consistent with (x, y, z) and before creating any new partitions, I had to make sure that the partitioning software saw the c, s, h as (x, y, z). This is what the line append=hde=77545,16,63 in my /etc/lilo.conf does. Lessons to be learnt from this: After you have partitioned your hard drive, always print out and store the c, h, s of your hard drive that was used during the partioning. When you want to partition a second time, make sure that the partitioning software is using this same c, h, s so that your new partitions become compatible with the old ones. I have not read any warnings or indications about disk damage occurring if you do not do this and you are only using linux on your harddrive and the hard drive is using lba32 and the bios supports lba32. I simply tend to be cautious when it comes to my hard drives. [As an added note: if you are sharing the drive with windows then it is imperative that the c, h, s that is seen from Windows must be compatible with the partitioning of the hard drive. Otherwise you risk disk corruption.] Best, Narfi. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] cylinders, sectors and heads trouble
On Sunday 09 June 2002 06:55, etharp wrote: more info about the new MOBO is in order, in particular the IDE controller (is it a HPT win-RAID?) No, I stay clear of the raid controllers... The MSI k7T266 pro2 comes in different flavours and I chose the one which doesn't have any raid controllers. On the motherboard, I have: Primary master: the wd drive, /dev/hde secondary master: a DVD drive, /dev/hdg I also have a PCI controller card and on it I have: primary master: an old IBM hard drive for backups: /dev/hda primary slave: zip drive: /dev/hdb secondary master: CD-writer: /dev/hdc-- /dev/scd0 A correction to the c,h,s count in the bios: it is (19158, 16, 255). Narfi. On Saturday 08 June 2002 10:57 pm, Narfi wrote: In my previous life, I was young and ignorant and I bought a WD drive! ... well, I'm at least not young anymore .-) I installed mdk on this second harddrive of mine and the setup was with (cylinders, heads, sectors,) = (77545, 16, 63) However, after I moved the hard drive to a my new motherboard and installed mdk 8.2, fdisk and diskdrake report the geometry as (c,h,s) = (4865, 255, 63) and fdisk warns that partitions do not end on cylinder boundaries. Can I still use diskdrake to create new partitions on this hard drive? I tried to put a section into lilo.conf: [this is the disk in question. Nevertheless it is on the primary ide0 controller:] disk=/dev/hde sectors=63 heads = 16 cylinders = 774545 But this didn't change the way fdisk and diskdrake saw the drive geometry. If I go into the bios, the geometry is listed with heads = 16 and cylinders some value 4 thousand something (sorry, forgot to write down!) I have lba32 in /etc/lilo.conf and I do not share this hard drive with any other OS. Does anyone have any suggestions? Resize the partitions to conform with heads = 255 using ext2online perhaps??? thanks, Narfi. mobo: MSI k7t266 pro2 /dev/hde: WD400BB fdisk -l /dev/hde Disk /dev/hde: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes Device BootStart EndBlocks Id System /dev/hde1 * 164511528+ 83 Linux Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary: phys=(1014, 15, 63) should be (1014, 254, 63) /dev/hde264 3844 30359448 85 Linux extended Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary: phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63) /dev/hde56496255496+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hde696 478 3071848+ 83 Linux /dev/hde7 478 1116 5119600+ 83 Linux /dev/hde8 1116 2901 14335744+ 83 Linux /dev/hde9 2901 3155 2047720+ 83 Linux /dev/hde10 3155 3206409216+ 83 Linux /dev/hde11 3206 3844 5119600+ 83 Linux Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
