Fw: [MLB-WIRELESS] HDD question

[Donovan Baarda]

On Sat, 2003-03-08 at 16:43, Lincoln Smith wrote:
> From: Lincoln Smith 
> To: Alfred Shippen 
> Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2003 4:42 PM
> Subject: Re: [MLB-WIRELESS] HDD question
> 
> 
> nah it stopped even coming up with a shell prompt..the drive no longer boots, and it most definitely can't be mounted as linux won't start (hangs at the partition listing in kernel startup before it kicks into the init process)
> 
> fdisk seems to be unable to see the drive.
> 
> That's what has me stumped...the IBM diskcheck software (which creates it's own boot floppy) seems to be able to access the drive fine but everything else throws a hissy fit.

if the master boot-record is corrupt, then it won't boot.

if the partition table is corrupt, it won't boot either, and the
DOS/Windoze fdisk can kill itself trying to read it. Linux fdisk and
cfdisk are generally better at handling this.

If you have used the IBM utilites to zero it then you will have wiped it
clean. I would expect DOS/Windoze to fdisk to work ok on a wiped HDD.

I have also seen weird things happen with disks put into different
machines with/without LBA support. If the disk was partitioned with LBA
on, the drive geometry will be all screwed when using the disk on a
machine without LBA (and the other way around). Modern bios'es let you
specify "auto" for LBA, which means it looks at the partition table to
figure out whether LBA was used or not when the drive was partitioned.

if you can boot linux from some other media, you should be able to sort
it out.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ABO: finger abo at minkirri.apana.org.au for more info, including pgp key
----------------------------------------------------------------------


To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at wireless.org.au
with "unsubscribe melbwireless" in the body of the message