[ale] The magic 7.8MB

[Justin Russell]

Yesterday I bought a new 20GB HD and I want to mirror an exact image of
another 13GB HD (first 5 GB Linux, rest is FAT32) onto it.  I used a
drive copy program to do this, but for some reason it copied the image
starting at the second cylinder on the new disk (that's what fdisk says
anyway), which the drive copy program reported as 7.8MB at the beginning
of the disk being unallocated.  I reconnected the new disk as a master
disk and tried to boot.  Of course this process seemed to blow away
LILO, so I had to go in with a boot floppy and rerun /sbin/lilo.  After
that, everything seemed to work fine.  I can dual boot and the files all
appear to be there.  Funny thing is, partition magic reports this disk
as having one large bad partition...

My question is,  what is it with this magic 7.8MB at the beginning of
the disk that programs don't seem to want to create a partition over?  I
know I ran into this problem originally with my 13GB disk, but after
playing around with partition magic and drive copy (many painful
iterations), I finally tricked it into slurping up this 7.8MB into my
Linux extended partition (fdisk reports my Linux extended partition as
starting as cylinder 1 and partition magic reports my partitions as
expected).  Can anyone explain what is going on here?  I guess I can
live with the drive since it seems to work fine (even though partition
magic doesn't like it), but I want my 7.8MB!!!  Any help/explanations
appreciated ;)


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 Justin W. Russell
 Engineer Senior, Aerodynamics/CFD
 Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company
 86 South Cobb Drive
 Marietta, GA  30063-0685

 Tel:  (770) 494-6303
 Fax:  (770) 494-3055
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