[Mageia-discuss] partitioning bug

[andre999]

blind Pete a écrit :
> David W. Hodgins wrote:
>
>    
>> On Fri, 06 Jul 2012 04:03:34 -0400, blind Pete
>> <0123peter at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> Morgan Leijström wrote:
>>>        
>>>> It would also be interesting to know what other tools say.
>>>> gparted?
>>>>          
>>      
>>> Gparted looks pretty.  As far as I can see, gparted agrees
>>> with what I think things should look like.  Gparted and
>>> fdisk agree about the number of sectors.  (More than you
>>> get by multiplying CxHxS.)
>>>        
>> Interesting.  I guess it would be best to use 'hdparm -i /dev/sda|grep
>> LBAsects" to find out the number of sectors.
>>
>> Regards, Dave Hodgins
>>      
> [root at live ~]# hdparm -i /dev/sda | grep LBA
>   CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=1953523055
> [root at live ~]#
>
> Same number of sectors as gparted and fdisk report.  Number of heads
> and sectors per cylinder are just, "it's a big disk".  _Posssibly_
> number of cylinders gives a clue about how big.  H can be 63 or 255,
> depending on mood, and CxHxS should be a little less than max LBA.
>
> The situation just got worse.  The latest work arround is to lie
> about how big a sector is.  That is called "advanced" formatting.
>
>    
Coming into this a little late, but I read somewhere that cfdisk was to 
avoid, because of unsolved bugs which could result in disk corruption.
That was a while back, but apparently it still applies.

BTW, with all those partitions, I would convert your disk to GPT tables 
instead of MBR, using gdisk.
(gdisk is in core.)
It will make your disk more stable.
It uses a 128 partition table,with a backup table at the end of the drive.
No such thing as "extended" partitions.
It takes less space than the ms-compatible MBR partition tables.
The only trick is that you need to leave space for the backup table (34 
512-byte sectors).
If you change your mind, you can convert back painlessly.
I've used GPT for over 2 years, including converting back and forth a 
few times at first.

To convert, you'll have to boot to a live disk, preferably with gdisk.
I use systemRescueCD for that. http://www.sysresccd.org/
The latest stable version is 379 Mib, usable from CD or USB key.
I don't know if a Mageia live cd, or Mageia DVD in rescue mode might work.

Just in case you might be interested

Regards :)

-- 
André