[Ma-linux] partition weirdness

[Jay Hart]

This also doesn't make any sense to me.  One thing I would look at is if a
newer version of the BIOS exists for your motherboard. Sounds like you could
have some corruption going on.

Jay

> Thanks to everyone with their distribution suggestions in response to my
> question last week. I figured out what was screwing up Fedora, but decided
> to give Ubuntu a try anyhow.
>
> The problem with Fedora makes no sense from my experience. There was an IDE
> drive and a IDE cd on the first contoller and an identical IDE drive on the
> secondary controller. For some reason the os though that both drives were on
> the primary controller. I found this out when I was considering installing
> Windows (to burn an install CD since I was booting Knoppix and couldn't
> eject the DVD to use the drive). Windows listed both drives as on the
> primary controller.
>
> Well, I canceled the Windows install but not before it changed the partition
> table on my second drive where I had all my data backed up.
>
> I'm currently at a loss.
>
> The file system seems ok. I tried deleting the windows partition table entry
> and creating one for ext2, and I couldn't mount it. From opening the disk in
> a hex editor, I can find the start of the filesystem by searching for the
> ext2 label. On my current root partition the start is at 0x400. On the
> deleted partition, it is at 0x6400. If I do:
>
> dd if=/dev/hdc1 of=test.ext2 bs=1024 skip=$((0x6000/1024)) count=50000
>
> I can then do:
>
> mount -o loop test.ext2 test
>
> I can't copy the whole filesystem though, it is 300gb and I only have one
> other 300gb drive.
>
> I tried creating the partition starting at cylinder 1, but it moved the
> start 0xA1400 bytes. I noticed that fdisk had options for changing the disk
> geometry. I was wondering what would happen if I changed that. Currently the
> two disks which are the same model purchased at the same time have different
> geometries:
>
> Disk /dev/hda: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>
> Disk /dev/hdc: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
> 86 heads, 15 sectors/track, 454319 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 1290 * 512 = 660480 bytes
>
> I suppose worst case scenario is a clear off as much space as possible, copy
> as much of the partition as possible, format the drive and the recovered
> data back. This seems really silly though.
>
> I suppose another option is to write a program to open the raw device and
> try to shift everything back 0x6000 bytes. This also seems like more work
> than ought to be needed. This disk worked before.
>
> Anyone have a clue?
>
> Will
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