[ale] fdisk Maxtor 40GB drive

[Joseph A. Knapka]

All I can say is, "EEEEEEYUCK!"

It's interesting that 23795 = 89331-65536. Seems fdisk
is using 2-byte integers to represent the cylinder count.
Clearly in your case that will just not work.

Frequently drives have alternate C/H/S numbers that will
work just as well. You need to find a combination where
the cylinder count is under 65536.

fdisk could be rebuilt to use larger integers for cylinder
counts - perhaps this has already been done. It's likely
to be a bit tricky, though.

-- Joe


Jim Popovitch wrote:
> 
> I am having a problem partitioning a new Maxtor 40GB drive.  The
> BIOS is set to AUTO, and dmesg indicates that Mandrake Linux 7.1
> (kernel  2.2.15-4) understands the drive parameters.  However,
> fdisk reports a smaller number of cylinders, thus cheating me
> out of 3/4 of my new drive. :(  What am I missing on this?
> 
> -Jim P.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> dmesg has this:
>    hdd: Maxtor 54610H6, 43967MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=89331/16/63
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> $ fdisk /dev/hdd
> 
> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 23795.
> There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO)
> 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
>    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> 
> Command (m for help): p
> 
> Disk /dev/hdd: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 23795 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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-- Joe Knapka
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