[ltp] Thinkpad 770Z with 14.1 GB Drive.

Rob Mayoff linux-thinkpad@www.bm-soft.com
Tue, 16 Nov 1999 22:27:23 -0600 (CST)


| Whenever I do fdisk -l /dev/hda, I get *nothing* returned. fdisk on its own
| says it can't open /dev/hda.

Is that all it says?  Give us the EXACT output.  Also, make sure you're
running it as root.

| BTW, the output of sfdisk -l produces this (notice the cannot read sector
| error and that it only shows that I have 6 partitions):

That error is mostly likely the result of the disk driver having the
wrong disk geometry.  The disk driver won't let a user program read
from /dev/hda outside what it thinks are the geometry bounds of the
disk, so fdisk and sfdisk can't read the whole partition table (which is
spread across the disk).  But when the driver itself reads the partition
table, it doesn't limit itself, so the kernel's in-memory partition
table is correct (as evidenced by /proc/partitions).

I know you said you tried "hda=1826,240,63", but I suspect you did it
wrong, because it's the only known explanation for your problem. Try it
again, something like this:

	LILO: linux hda=1826,240,63

Once it's booted, try fdisk again. If it still doesn't work, run this
command and send us the output:

	hdparm -i /dev/hda

Also send the exact output of fdisk. And, if you can, run fdisk under
strace and send the last 20 lines of output.

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