"value out of range" partitioning prob?

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

handbook says

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

The 65536 listed as your ending sectors for sda1 seems very suspicious. Did you accidently let sda1 take up the whole disk by pressing enter instead of specifying a size for the partition?

Could you post the output of `fdisk -l`? (that's a lowercase L)

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 9:12 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

Something is badly broken there. Valid partition numbers are in the range 1-4. Thats for primary partitions.
For logical partitions, you don't get to choose a number. They are formed from a linked list, starting at 5.

Worse, the first partition does not start at sector 0. The MBR gor there.

If thats a MSDOS partition table on a PC, throw it away and start again. If its some other partition table on some other hardware, what and what?

PC hardware with GPT allows you 255 primary partitions.
Sun disklabels on SPARC have some odd requirements, which I would need to look up
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

here we go:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 9:23 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

Delete all the partitions.

A word of warning - some versions of windows use GPT, which fdisk doesn't understand. Newer fdisk does flag a warning though.
The warning is about GPT, the partition table is close to the front of the disk and there is another copy at the end of the disk somewhere.

If your partition table is really GPT, you need to kill both copies of the partition table or you will have problems later.
Try parted - that understands GPT.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

not really getting further:

in parted ran

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 10:15 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

copy /dev/zero to the first few MB of the drive and the last few MB. Make that 1G if you have the time.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

sorry - tired - but i don't follow you -
how & where would i do this?

confused...
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lo-jay

The mechanic "One of 'em Dodge Chargers - let him go by."
The driver "Not today!"

taken from "Two Lane Blacktop"

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 11:12 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

DONAHUE · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:15 am Post subject:

boot to xfce gui
in bottom row of icons find and double click gparted
device-->new partition table-->msdos
edit-->apply all operations
partition--> make 1 ext2 50 mb is enough 200mb is an awful lot
partition--> make 1 swap same size as your ram
partition--> make 1 ext3
edit-->apply all operations
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cyrillic · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:23 am Post subject:

DONAHUE · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:39 am Post subject:

at this point uname -a will tell about the sysresccd.
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Defund the FCC.

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:45 am Post subject:

Yes, and it will tell if the CPU is a SPARC or something ...

DONAHUE · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:56 am Post subject:

Interesting thought.
Identified in another thread as samsung p580

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 2:01 am Post subject:

In that case, Neddy was right.
The old partition table should be nuked from orbit, it is the only way to be sure :wink:

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

well, used the nite to dd the whole thing with

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 12:20 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

Thats better. On a disc with 512b sectors and the normal faked 255 heads, 63 sectors per track and a MSDOS Partition table, the first partition starts at sector 63.
Thats head 1, sector 0 track 0. The reasons for this are historical - buy me a beer and I'll tell you all about it :)

On drives with 4kB physical sectors (I don't have one) it gets more tricky. These drives fake 512b sectors but at a large speed penalty.
If you have one of these you need to ensure your partitions are aligned on 4kB boundaries. Don't use fdisk as it obeys the old DOS rules about filesystems starting and ending on cylinder boundaries. Use parted and partition starts that are an integer multiple of 4kiB.

Having said all that, a start block for the first partition of 2048 looks very high but it depends on what your drive reports as its geometry.
Max heads is 255 and max sectors/track is 63, from the sizes of the fields allocaked for CHS addressing, so it doesn't make sense yet.

What is the part number of the drive, so we can look at its data sheet ?
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 12:44 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

Google has never heard of it but it seems to belong to a family of IDE 2.5 inch 4200rpm drives.
Its unlikely it has 4kB sectors as that is something used on bigger drives (> 1TB) or 'green' drives only.

What you have will work bu you are wasting some space. What is the entire

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

just working on it,

but another dummie question: i do not have to create a filesystem on my extended partition?
do i?

cheers?
_________________
lo-jay

The mechanic "One of 'em Dodge Chargers - let him go by."
The driver "Not today!"

taken from "Two Lane Blacktop"

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:39 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

No, you can't ... it doesn't actually exist. The extended partition is a dirty hack introduced when hard drives got to 128Mb.
In those days, the maximum DOS file system size was 32Mb, so four 32Mb partitions for 32Mb file systems and you couldn't use the rest of the disk.

You make logical partitions inside the extended partition and put filesystems on the logical partitions.
Your primary partitions are numbered 1..4. At most, one primary partition may be an extended partition. Logical partitions start at 5 and are numbered incrementally.
If you delete a logical partition, the numbers of all the higher numbered partitions are decremented, which messes up fstab.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

sorry for this kinda troubled installation, but am stuck again:
i would love to proceed with
Quote:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 1:56 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

SystemRescueCD has a GUI and a browser.

Boot into the GUI, open a terminal for the install, in the terminal,

lo-jay · l33t Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 862

well, noone said it would be easy...

starting all over again.

here

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 2:45 pm Post subject:

lo-jay,

Does that disk have a strange boot loader on it that hides itself at the start of the disk ?
Zeroing the whole drive may not have wiped it - it depends on how good it was at hiding.

Other than the 2048 for the start of the first partition, it all looks normal.

You will fetch two files for your Gentoo install, the stage3, which needs to go into /mnt/gentoo and the portage snapshot, which needs to go into /mnt/gentoo/usr.
/mnt/gentoo/usr will be created when you untar the stage3.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.