[ale] Partially corrupt partition table, Mandrake 10.1

[William Bagwell]

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On Friday 01 April 2005 10:02 am, Joe Steele wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, William Bagwell wrote:
> > Note. There are only two OSs currently, two others were turned into
> > space for backups. Strongly suspect that the third non-contiguous FAT
> > partition is the root cause of my problems. Should have a limit of 255
> > partitions, not 16.
>
> From a linux perspective, I think the partition limit is 63: /dev/hda1 ..
> /dev/hda63.

Not sure where I saw the 255, do remember a much larger limit than 16.

> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >------------------------- The number of cylinders for this disk is set
> > to 14946.
> > There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> > and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> > 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> > 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
> >    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> > Warning: deleting partitions after 16
>
> This warning seems unusual to me.  What I see in the fdisk source is that
> a warning is printed when the number of defined partitions reaches 60,
> not 16.
>
> I see nothing particularly unusual in the data for the 16 partitions on
> which fdisk reported, but there are obviously more partitions which are
> not being reported on (hence the warning).

Yes, three more plus an empty "space" that only shows in DrakeX.

> I'd suggest getting the current source for fdisk and recompiling it, then
> repeat the test to see what other partition data is printed:
>
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/util-linux-2.12q.tar.gz
>
> Alternatively, you could try using an fdisk from a Knoppix CD or some
> other rescue-type distro.

Knoppix (3.7) shows them with fdisk -l. (Have not yet run your full script 
from Knoppix as it locked my "Documents" files for some reason...)

Also discovered they show up in /dev as block devices. With fresh back-ups 
would this be a convenient place to try to delete them?

Thanks again!

William

root at ttyp1[knoppix]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         510     4096543+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2             511       14665   113700037+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5             511        1275     6144831    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hda6            1276        1320      356800+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7            3841        3959      951016+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda8            3959        5201     9973624+  83  Linux
/dev/hda9            5201        7695    20031448+  83  Linux
/dev/hda10           1320        1434      919957+  83  Linux
/dev/hda11           2059        2189     1044256+  83  Linux
/dev/hda12           2189        3841    13269784+  83  Linux
/dev/hda13           7695        8824     9067432+  83  Linux
/dev/hda14           8825       11998    25495123+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hda15           1435        1535      811251   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda16           1536        2058     4200966   83  Linux
/dev/hda17          11999       12762     6136798+  83  Linux
/dev/hda18          12763       12902     1124518+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda19          12903       14665    14161266   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order