Fw: [MLB-WIRELESS] HDD question

[Lincoln Smith]

Well i got it working!! yay.  The drive has been in this state for probably
18 months..i just held on to it coz i thought i might be able to get it to
work one day...

I threw it in a server i'm putting together...linux didn't hang on the
partition listing and i was able to fdisk it and now it all seems fine.

I have no idea why it worked this time...

Lincoln Smith
dagdamor at optushome.com.au
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donovan Baarda" <abo at minkirri.apana.org.au>
To: "Lincoln Smith" <dagdamor at optushome.com.au>
Cc: "MelbWireless" <melbwireless at wireless.org.au>
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2003 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: [MLB-WIRELESS] HDD question


> 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
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>


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