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gojuka
Apprentice
Joined: 18 Oct 2002
Posts: 235
Location: Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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 Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 1:41 pm Post subject: Windows won't piss off! (fdisk issues) |
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Hi all,
Been running gentoo on my laptop for about a month now and I love it. No, grub does not suck. 
So I decided to upgrade my desktop to gentoo as well. It has 2 drives, and 8GB (hda) and a 4GB (hdc). I have mandrake 9 on the hdc and windows 98se on hda. My plan was to backup anything important on hda (quicken files, old email, pr0n ...), install gentoo on hda, move my user environment from hdc to hda, reinstall win98 to hdc (I only use it to play 1/2life). No prob.
So out of habit, I boot from my win98 CD to a command line. Used Windows fdisk to delete the Windows partition and rebooted. Booting from the Gentoo CD, I ran fdisk and created hda1 (/boot), hda2 (swap) and hda3 (/), wrote that out and rebooted (probably not required but old habits).
After booting from the gentoo CD again, I followed the usual install instructions including running `mke2fs -j` on /dev/hda1 and mkreiserfs on /dev/hda3. But after mounting /mnt/gentoo and /mnt/gentoo/boot, I tried to unpack the stage1 tarball, but it errored out. The tarball was fine, but it failed to write something. I looked around and, doing an ls on /boot, I got back the directory listed for the root of my windows C: drive! *zoiks*
[Wackiness ensues] `mount` showed me that when I ran `mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot` it actually mounted /dev/hda1 as vfat and not ext3! But if I explicitly mounted /dev/hda1 as ext3, then it looked fine (empty except for a lost+found). I don't get it.
Why would mount assume /dev/hda1 was vfat when it is ext3 ... even fdisk shows it as ext3.
Mark
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Exci
Apprentice
Joined: 12 Jul 2002
Posts: 265
Location: The Netherlands, Zoetermeer
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| Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 5:26 pm Post subject: |
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i had that same problem once ..
i started reading the fdisk man page and i found this:
| Code: |
DOS 6.x WARNING
The DOS 6.x FORMAT command looks for some information in the first sector of the data area of the parti-
tion, and treats this information as more reliable than the information in the partition table. DOS FOR-
MAT expects DOS FDISK to clear the first 512 bytes of the data area of a partition whenever a size change
occurs. DOS FORMAT will look at this extra information even if the /U flag is given -- we consider this
a bug in DOS FORMAT and DOS FDISK.
The bottom line is that if you use cfdisk or fdisk to change the size of a DOS partition table entry,
then you must also use dd to zero the first 512 bytes of that partition before using DOS FORMAT to format
the partition. For example, if you were using cfdisk to make a DOS partition table entry for /dev/hda1,
then (after exiting fdisk or cfdisk and rebooting Linux so that the partition table information is valid)
you would use the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1" to zero the first 512 bytes of
the partition.
BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL if you use the dd command, since a small typo can make all of the data on your disk
useless.
For best results, you should always use an OS-specific partition table program. For example, you should
make DOS partitions with the DOS FDISK program and Linux partitions with the Linux fdisk or Linux cfdisk
program.
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really
Guru
Joined: 27 Aug 2002
Posts: 430
Location: nowhere
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| Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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yea i would do as the other guy mentioned. zero out the mbr and then write a new one format and install.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=512
fdisk /dev/hda
and it will tell you theres no mbr or something blah blah bla.... write a new one and youre done.
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NoManNoProblem
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LoOpYgUy
n00b
Joined: 24 Sep 2002
Posts: 30
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| Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 6:27 pm Post subject: |
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As well, you could just boot of a windows boot disk, since you stated earlier that you are more familiar with the evil empires fdisk utility, and type
That should take care of the issue as well. |
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gojuka
Apprentice
Joined: 18 Oct 2002
Posts: 235
Location: Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 6:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | you stated earlier that you are more familiar with the evil empires fdisk utility |
I said what? Where? When? Man, do I feel insulted. Just FYI, I've been using Linux as my sole desktop since 1993. I have one windows install that I use to play half-life. Where you got "more familiar with the evil empires fdisk" from I have no idea.
I don't want to whack the mbr because I have lilo in there to boot my existing mandrake 9 install. I just thought it odd that mount was mounting hda1 as vfat when I've overwritten the partition table already.
Mark
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rac
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 May 2002
Posts: 6553
Location: Japanifornia
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| Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 7:44 pm Post subject: |
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Try searching the forums for "ghost and superblock".
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LoOpYgUy
n00b
Joined: 24 Sep 2002
Posts: 30
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| Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 1:02 am Post subject: |
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Well when I seen this line in your post...
| Quote: | | So out of habit, I boot from my win98 CD to a command line. Used Windows fdisk to delete the Windows partition |
It looked as if that was the case. 100,000,000 appologies for the insult  |
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gojuka
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Joined: 18 Oct 2002
Posts: 235
Location: Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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| Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 1:21 am Post subject: |
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Ah I see. Sorry, by "out of habit" I meant that in the past (and as someone mentioned, it is still best practice) you really wanted to use windows fdisk to munge windows partitions, and linux fdisk to munge linux partitions. My apologies as well!
Nonetheless, dd'ing the start of the partition fixed it.
Mark
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Installing Gentoo
