[ltp] T41 Recovery CD

[Nick Bower]

Not that it helps you, but Mandrake's Diskdrake recognised the HPA and
(in basic mode) filled up the disk right until the very last sector
before the HPA, treating it like a normal partition to protect unless
you delete it.  I can even mount it as normal.  It's a great tool -
possibly even worth just booting of a Mandrake CDm writing a MBR then
aborting the install.

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 15:31, Jan Kokoska wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 08:39 -0400, Eben King wrote:
> > On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Jan Kokoska wrote:
> > 
> 
> > Well, when I created a partition with the SuSE installer, it extended onto
> > the HPA.  An unpatched kernel would not read this partition (although
> > SuSE's kernels would), so I'd guess that SuSE could dd over the HPA where
> > some systems could not.  Also, if you erase the current partition table
> > with fdisk (or maybe write a new one?), that may fix it.  Dunno; mine's 
> > still unfixed.
> 
> Creating the partition is one thing (writes to the first sector),
> creating a filesystem another (writing inode superblocks to whole disk
> including HPA). Were you able to create and mount an extX partition
> using SuSE kernel?
> 
> I erased the whole disk with dd, standard procedure. When it got to the
> end where HPA lives, it bombed out, no matter what the BIOS settings
> were.
> 
> But you set me on track, it could be the kernel.. maybe it needs to do
> something special to convince the disk controller it is OK, once BIOS
> doesn't stand in the way.
> 
> Jan