On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 07:20:48PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> I've got two IDE drives, both as masters on separate channels. The
> first one has many and varied OS partitions on it (mostly
> primaries), the second has a primary partition (for Windows apps)
> and a huge logical partition for archives and saved stuff. It's
> this partition that's unhappy.
> DOS7: "dir" returns garbage, but it thinks there's an E: drive
> there.
> Win98: An E: drive is there, albeit unaccessible and with no label.
> An F: drive appears, showing everything that E: normally would.
> It's all fine, it all works, but it's SLOW.
> Win2K: (don't ask) Sees the E: drive as usual, but runs SLOW.
> Everything works normally.
> Linux: During boot, the kernel comes up with [PTBL] (which does not
> normally appear) and the geometry of the hard drive, listing all of
> the partitions as it should. I can mount and play with my /dev/hdc5
> without any troubles at all, but again, it's SLOW.
[PTBL] (i believe) means that linux is trusting the drive geometry
given in the partition table, instead of going with what the bios says
(usually they agree, so you don't see this). i get it on one of my
drives cos i forced the c/h/s layout into something other than what
the bios wanted. its ok, relatively harmless, and works (i only run
linux, so i don't know how other os's treat it)
i'm presuming the partition is some form of fat/vfat/fat32 filesystem.
unless the kernel is logging disturbing things like "unable to access
beyond end of device" while accessing files on the partition, i'd say
its a problem with the filesystem, not the partition table or drive
geometry.
its probably either:
1. stuffed, but somehow still readable most of the time (a
scandisk/fsck should tell you if this is the case)
2. horribly fragmented
3. some wierd cluster size inefficiency (esp. since its such a large
partition). i don't really know (or care, to be honest) enough about
fat filesytems to know how to tell if this is the case. partition
magic, etc should be able to do conversions for you, if this is the
problem.
4. just a really slow drive. but i doubt it, since the other
partition works fine (?). "hdparm" is good for this sort of
testing/tweaking.
i'd access it, then check the kernel logs (/var/log/kern.log on debian
or the output of dmesg(8)) to see if the kernel thinks there is
anything wrong with the hardware or filesystem.
--
- Gus
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