I've got a nice problem with my 10GB harddisk.
I've configured 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition that contains
3 logical partitions (see output of sfdisk below).
Intentionally I've left 1GB unassigned to be used either as Windows98 or
Linux spare place.
For clean-up of the the Windows partition (/dev/hda1) I've added a new
logical partition using all space that was left, rebooted Windows, formatted
the (new) D drive and put my data there. Nothing went wrong until this step
... .
Then I wanted to reboot Linux, but Windows (for unknown reasons) did not
properly shut down. This meant: reboot Windows and let it do the automatic
scandisk. After Windows had finally started the D drive (/dev/hda8) was lost
... a little bit anoying for the data I still wanted to verify, but so what!
The problem I've now is that I can no more cfdisk, fdisk or sfdisk to
reconfigure partition 8. The first two utilities simply return a read error
on /dev/hda, fdisk in addition provides a warning about the number of
cylinders.
sfdisk provides the following output (created with `script disk.problem'):
Script started on Wed Aug 2 21:05:51 2000
vbNtbk:~ # sfdisk -uS -d /dev/hda
read: Success
sfdisk: read error on /dev/hda - cannot read sector 4132205439
# partition table of /dev/hda
unit: sectors
/dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 8194977, Id= b, bootable
/dev/hda2 : start= 8195040, size= 529200, Id=83
/dev/hda3 : start= 8724240, size= 4203360, Id=83
/dev/hda4 : start= 12927600, size= 6713280, Id= 5
/dev/hda5 : start= 12927663, size= 529137, Id=82
/dev/hda6 : start= 13456863, size= 1587537, Id=83
/dev/hda7 : start= 15044463, size= 2101617, Id=83
vbNtbk:~ # exit
Script done on Wed Aug 2 21:06:04 2000
I looks that the partition table is still OK (except that /dev/hda8 is
missing). I guess that the read error of cfdisk and fdisk are due to the
unreasonable sector number 4132205439 (compared to start sector of
/dev/hd7). It may be that partition 8 somehow got corrupted and now has an
unreasonable entry in the partition table.
My questions are:
1) Where does this huge sector number come from, it would be nice to know?
2) How can I correct it without recreating the partition table from scratch
(a rather tedious approach) with e.g. `cfdisk -z'? Is there a way how I can
just create a tiny partition 8 (and remove it afterwards)?
Your advide is very appreciated, Stephan
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