[plug] Partition weirdness ... (was "Ghost" for Linux?)

[Trevor Phillips]

Nick Bannon wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > Oh yes. What's prompted this right now (that I've been putting off for
> > ages) is that I have another HDD with a FAT drive that Linux works fine
> > with, but Windows no longer recognises and keeps asking if I want it
> > formatted!! (Has anyone seen this before?)
> [...]
> 
> Windows doesn't understand complicated partition tables - maybe that's
> it. Back up the partition table, delete everything but the FAT
> partition, make sure Windows is happy, then restore the partition table?

The partition table actually seems dodgy. Here's what fdisk says about it:

Disk /dev/hdd: 128 heads, 63 sectors, 935 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 bytes
 
   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdd1             2       935   3765888    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(933, 127, 63) logical=(934, 127, 63)
/dev/hdd5             2       427   1717600+   6  FAT16
/dev/hdd6           428       935   2048224+  83  Linux

As you can see, it's a secondary slave, partitioned to have one big extended
partition, in which resides a logical FAT part, & a logical linux part. And the
dodgy bit is that different physical/logical endings bit. I'm *sure* it wasn't
like that when I partitioned it all those months (years?) ago...

Ah well, I think I'll just back the whole lot up, nuke it, & repartition it
from scratch (and pray the backup restore works).

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Systems Administrator     -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
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