[ltp] GRUB Geom Error after new installation of Suse 9.1

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004, Weeze wrote:

> A June 2004 question never was resolved as far as I can tell. I have 
> exactly the same problem with a new T40 ThinkPad and a new installation 
> of Suse 9.1. 

This is a very well known problem in the disk geometry detection code of
2.6 kernels (wrong value returned) and parted (it "fixes" the partition
table when it shouldn't). All distro has it because nobody fixed it yet
upstream (kernel and parted) although the maintainers know about this
problem at least since November of 2003.

SUSE errara,

  http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/05/fhassel_windows_not_booting91.html

Some general info (please note, the issue isn't NTFS related, it can
happen with FAT32 or even if you have already unallocated space, e.g. 
you used some external tool like Partition Magic to do the partitioning
before installation).

  http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

> The original Windows XP is still on the harddrive, because I can see
> all of the files in the Windows "drive" in "My Computer" in the KDE
> Desktop. 

You're lucky this case can be easily recovered. The worst case when
additionally to this problem, parted also incorrectly aligns the partition
start to a new cylinder boundary based on the incorrect info returned by
the kernel. That's also recoverable of course but it's more steps,
sometimes not even trivial and must be done totally manually (gpart,
testdisk don't help).

	Szaka