770Z using the full 14G drive

[Mark Ball]

On Sat, 17 Jul 1999, Rob Mayoff wrote:

> | It all works fine, but after I was done Linux fdisk won't read the partition
> | table anymore :(
> | but that's OK cause I'm not going to change it anytime soon :)
> 
> I had exactly that problem - all the partitions were accessible through
> Linux but fdisk couldn't read the partition table. The cause was that
> Linux didn't have the right disk geometry. The disk driver would not
> allow you to seek past the 1024-cylinder mark on /dev/hda, so fdisk
> couldn't read the whole partition table.

Similar woes with RH6.  Aggravating that fdisk let me create 4 logical
partitions in the factory Extended LBA (2 below, 2 above 1024 cylinder)
then permanently vapor-lock on the disk.  To add insult to injury, linux
is perfectly happy with the partitions even though it reads the wrong
geometry.  At the shell console I mke2fs'd the 0x83 partitons, mount'd
them, and copied the contents of the CD to one.  Selecting "install from
disk" caused RH install to segfault.  One of the many things I tried was
hda=1826,240,63 at the boot prompt.  It did not help.

Regular fdisk was failing with "unable to read".  This turned out to be
the sector read for the 3rd logical partition, the first one to start,
end, and be entirely contained above cylinder 1024.  Take your pick
at which one is the cause.  (Seemed to me to be the first, but I'm an
idiot.)

Unpleasantly, RH install uses Dumb Druid to construct fstab which uses
its own libfdisk.  Didn't get anywhere reading the source.

Current config has factory FAT, extended up to 1024 with two logical
partitions, and two primary paritions above 1024; disk fully allocated.

mark