Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread alain . roos 
Package: cdrom
Version: Debian 3.0 r0 i3

I recently buyed a AMD Athon based computer with Windows XP preinstalled

During installation, Fdisk is not capable of reading the partition table of
my 160 GB ide disk
Installation fails as it is not possible to create partitions to install
Linux.

I do not want to erase the 75.20 Go primary partition which contains the
Win XP installation (pre-installed,
only the recovery CD is available, imoortant features for me not yet
supported by linux drivers,e.g.
video capture support for nVidia GEforce Fx chip).

When starting Win XP, partitions are reported as follows :
primary C: 75.20 Go
extended
logical disk D: 996 Mo
LD L: 67.01 Go
LD E: 5.86 Go

When booting the Debian install disk , the cfdisk says :
FATAL ERROR : Bad primary partition 1 : Partition ends after end-of-disk
Press any key to exit cfdisk

I escaped to the shell, mounted a floppy with sfdisk and
obtained :


Disk /dev/hda: 16709 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start End   #cyls   #blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *  0+   98169817- 788550217  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2   9817   194569640  77433300f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1022,0,1)
end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1022,254,63)
/dev/hda3  0   -   0 00  Empty
/dev/hda4  0   -   0 00  Empty
/dev/hda5   9817+   9943 127-  10200967  HPFS/NTFS
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/hda6   9944+  186918748- 70268278+   7  HPFS/NTFS
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)

I  succesfully installed a year ago that Distribution on a Pentium II
laptop.

What can be done so that the the linux fdisk and Win XP are consistent and
partitioning is safe ?


Thank you in advance for your help

Alain ROOS

mail : alain dot roos at degussa dot com





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Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Steve McIntyre 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:57:37AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Package: cdrom
>Version: Debian 3.0 r0 i3
>
>I recently buyed a AMD Athon based computer with Windows XP preinstalled
>
>During installation, Fdisk is not capable of reading the partition table of
>my 160 GB ide disk
>Installation fails as it is not possible to create partitions to install
>Linux.
>
>I do not want to erase the 75.20 Go primary partition which contains the
>Win XP installation (pre-installed,
>only the recovery CD is available, imoortant features for me not yet
>supported by linux drivers,e.g.
>video capture support for nVidia GEforce Fx chip).

Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
will not support it. I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on
the Woody install CDs will work here, but it's worth a try. At the
boot prompt when starting the installation off CD, use "bf24" and see
if that helps.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
"C++ ate my sanity" -- Jon Rabone


pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Bug#208736: problem installing Debian from LordSutch MiniCD

2003-09-05 Thread Chan Tai Man 
> I downloaded the .iso file for the "Debian GNU/Linux
> 3.0 LORDSUTCH.COM
> MiniCD i386 Binary-1" from
> http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/debian-cd/ .
> [snapped]

If you are talking about version 26 of the
*unofficial* LordSutch.com ISOLINUX test
image/mini-ISO for Debian 3.0, please carry on
reading.

>
file:/instmnt/pool/main/b/bash/bash_2.05a-11_i386.deb
> was corrupt"
> [snapped]
> I'm 99% sure the .iso file was downloaded exactly as

> it was on the
> server, [snapped]

You might want to cast your 1% doubt on error during
download. That's why jigdo is such a good idea. md5sum
your iso image to see if it match the published
md5sum.txt from the same place to obtain your raw/iso
file 
which should read:

  1ebbcd163d092f458bc26cb9cfec241d 194543616
woody-i386-1.raw

Alternatively, you may md5sum only that .deb package
in question. Mount your CD-R and cd to it's root. Do
this:

  md5sum ./pool/main/b/bash/bash_2.05a-11_i386.deb

If you don't get this:

  a6048e7a8a3901f2621106d540fce61f  
./pool/main/b/bash/bash_2.05a-11_i386.deb

you might want to forget about your 99% certainty and
investigate into this one in a hundred changes.

Cheers

Iota Small


Want to chat instantly with your online friends?  Get the FREE Yahoo!
Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk


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Bug#208809: Réf. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread alain . roos 

Thank you very much for that valuable information.

I have also tried to boot with the bf24 image. With the same result.
This confirms Mr. Winter's answer.

However, I did NOT try what sfdisk says when using the bf24 image.
I will try that this week-end and post the result here (if it differs).

May it be possible that only an instable (2.5.xx) kernel works here ?

Does someone know were I could find :
- if the problem has been already been solved ?
- if so, in which kernel version ?

Thank you !

Alain ROOS, Betschdorf, France

alain dot roos at degussa dot com


   
   
  Steve McIntyre   
   
  <[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pour :   [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL 
PROTECTED]
  m>   cc :
   
   Objet :  Re: Bug#208809: partition 
problem 
  05/09/2003 11:18 
   
   
   
   
   




>On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:57:37AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Package: cdrom
>Version: Debian 3.0 r0 i3
>During installation, Fdisk is not capable of reading the partition table
of
>my 160 GB ide disk

Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
will not support it. I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on
the Woody install CDs will work here, but it's worth a try. At the
boot prompt when starting the installation off CD, use "bf24" and see
if that helps.

--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"C++ ate my sanity" -- Jon Rabone
(See attached file: att4dog4.dat)




att4dog4.dat
Description: Binary data

Re: R?f. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Steve McIntyre 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:43:20AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Thank you both very much for that valuable information.
>
>I have also tried to boot with the bf24 image. With the same result.
>This confirms Mr. Winter's answer.
>
>However, I did NOT try what sfdisk says when using the bf24 image.
>I will try that this week-end and post the result (if it differs).
>
>May it be possible that only an instable (2.5.xx) kernel works here ?
>
>Does someone know were I could find :
>- if the problem has been already been solved ?
>- if so, in which kernel version ?

Unfortunately I've told you all I know, really. I don't use IDE at all
myself, so I don't know all the details here to be able to help _much_
more. However, a quick google search (160GB disk linux kernel)
suggests that 2.4.19 and later may work better. If you have another
system available where you could build a kernel, it should be possible
to build a new set of boot floppies that will support this disk.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.einval.com/steve/>My home page
"Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky,
"Tongue-tied & twisted, Just an earth-bound misfit, I..."


pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Bug#208809: Réf. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Richard Atterer 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:36:54AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> May it be possible that only an instable (2.5.xx) kernel works here ?

No, current 2.4 works. IIRC the relevant code has been present in the main 
kernel tree since 2.4.20 or so.

  Richard

-- 
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  |_) /|  Richard Atterer |  GnuPG key:
  | \/¯|  http://atterer.net  |  0x888354F7
  ¯ '` ¯


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Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Richard Atterer 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:18:28AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
> larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
> will not support it.

I can confirm this, I hit the same problem about a year ago.

> I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on the Woody install CDs will
> work here, but it's worth a try.

At the time I installed, bf2.4 didn't help - the relevant patch had not
made it into the main kernel tree, it was only in -ac. But I don't remember
whether bf2.4 used 2.4.16 or 2.4.18 then.

A workaround is to install using a filing system which you can later (once
a newer kernel is installed) grow beyond the 128G mark. These days, AFAIK
ext2, reiserfs and xfs allow resizing of the filesystem - I'd go for 
reiserfs!

In contrast to Alain I started off with an unpartitioned HD, so cfdisk just
reported a size of 128G. Alain, to make cfdisk accept the HD, you should
try deleting _under_Windows_ the partition(s) on the disk which lie beyond
128G (L: AFAICT). The XP partition manager has a nice graphical display of
where the partitions are located on disk, they should be easy to identify.

Cheers,

  Richard

-- 
  __   _
  |_) /|  Richard Atterer |  GnuPG key:
  | \/¯|  http://atterer.net  |  0x888354F7
  ¯ '` ¯


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Bug#208809: Réf. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread alain . roos 

I'll try to build a 2.4.20 kernel image and write it down on a floppy.
I suppose that if I use the same root/swap indications as in the kernels
present on the cd
(with rdev), the floppy will continue towards the CD ?

Concerning the proposal to remove all partitions above 128G :
The manufacturer installed all software restoring images in a partition
(Win32 FAT) in
the last 5 Gb of the disk. I'd better not remove that, because the recovery
CD uses
that partition's data to fix issues with the main Win XP partition.

Supposed that the new kernel will support the disk size beyond 128G for
fdisk purposes,
and I will install all stuff beyond 128G, could I loose the last partition
(recovery) when fdisk rewrites
the partition table(s) ?

Thank you : I feel that we are going quicky towards a solution and  that
I've learned a lot today
with all responses I got.

Alain ROOS


wrote :

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:18:28AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
> larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
> will not support it.

I can confirm this, I hit the same problem about a year ago.

> I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on the Woody install CDs will
> work here, but it's worth a try.

At the time I installed, bf2.4 didn't help - the relevant patch had not
made it into the main kernel tree, it was only in -ac. But I don't remember
whether bf2.4 used 2.4.16 or 2.4.18 then.

A workaround is to install using a filing system which you can later (once
a newer kernel is installed) grow beyond the 128G mark. These days, AFAIK
ext2, reiserfs and xfs allow resizing of the filesystem - I'd go for
reiserfs!

In contrast to Alain I started off with an unpartitioned HD, so cfdisk just
reported a size of 128G. Alain, to make cfdisk accept the HD, you should
try deleting _under_Windows_ the partition(s) on the disk which lie beyond
128G (L: AFAICT). The XP partition manager has a nice graphical display of
where the partitions are located on disk, they should be easy to identify.

Cheers,

  Richard

--
  __   _
  |_) /|  Richard Atterer |  GnuPG key:
  | \/¯|  http://atterer.net  |  0x888354F7
  ¯ '` ¯







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To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread alain . roos 
Package: cdrom
Version: Debian 3.0 r0 i3

I recently buyed a AMD Athon based computer with Windows XP preinstalled

During installation, Fdisk is not capable of reading the partition table of
my 160 GB ide disk
Installation fails as it is not possible to create partitions to install
Linux.

I do not want to erase the 75.20 Go primary partition which contains the
Win XP installation (pre-installed,
only the recovery CD is available, imoortant features for me not yet
supported by linux drivers,e.g.
video capture support for nVidia GEforce Fx chip).

When starting Win XP, partitions are reported as follows :
primary C: 75.20 Go
extended
logical disk D: 996 Mo
LD L: 67.01 Go
LD E: 5.86 Go

When booting the Debian install disk , the cfdisk says :
FATAL ERROR : Bad primary partition 1 : Partition ends after end-of-disk
Press any key to exit cfdisk

I escaped to the shell, mounted a floppy with sfdisk and
obtained :


Disk /dev/hda: 16709 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start End   #cyls   #blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *  0+   98169817- 788550217  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2   9817   194569640  77433300f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1022,0,1)
end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1022,254,63)
/dev/hda3  0   -   0 00  Empty
/dev/hda4  0   -   0 00  Empty
/dev/hda5   9817+   9943 127-  10200967  HPFS/NTFS
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/hda6   9944+  186918748- 70268278+   7  HPFS/NTFS
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)

I  succesfully installed a year ago that Distribution on a Pentium II
laptop.

What can be done so that the the linux fdisk and Win XP are consistent and
partitioning is safe ?


Thank you in advance for your help

Alain ROOS

mail : alain dot roos at degussa dot com

Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Steve McIntyre 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:57:37AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Package: cdrom
>Version: Debian 3.0 r0 i3
>
>I recently buyed a AMD Athon based computer with Windows XP preinstalled
>
>During installation, Fdisk is not capable of reading the partition table of
>my 160 GB ide disk
>Installation fails as it is not possible to create partitions to install
>Linux.
>
>I do not want to erase the 75.20 Go primary partition which contains the
>Win XP installation (pre-installed,
>only the recovery CD is available, imoortant features for me not yet
>supported by linux drivers,e.g.
>video capture support for nVidia GEforce Fx chip).

Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
will not support it. I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on
the Woody install CDs will work here, but it's worth a try. At the
boot prompt when starting the installation off CD, use "bf24" and see
if that helps.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
"C++ ate my sanity" -- Jon Rabone


pgp3xFufUyRnb.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Bug#208736: problem installing Debian from LordSutch MiniCD

2003-09-05 Thread Chan Tai Man 
> I downloaded the .iso file for the "Debian GNU/Linux
> 3.0 LORDSUTCH.COM
> MiniCD i386 Binary-1" from
> http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/debian-cd/ .
> [snapped]

If you are talking about version 26 of the
*unofficial* LordSutch.com ISOLINUX test
image/mini-ISO for Debian 3.0, please carry on
reading.

>
file:/instmnt/pool/main/b/bash/bash_2.05a-11_i386.deb
> was corrupt"
> [snapped]
> I'm 99% sure the .iso file was downloaded exactly as

> it was on the
> server, [snapped]

You might want to cast your 1% doubt on error during
download. That's why jigdo is such a good idea. md5sum
your iso image to see if it match the published
md5sum.txt from the same place to obtain your raw/iso
file 
which should read:

  1ebbcd163d092f458bc26cb9cfec241d 194543616
woody-i386-1.raw

Alternatively, you may md5sum only that .deb package
in question. Mount your CD-R and cd to it's root. Do
this:

  md5sum ./pool/main/b/bash/bash_2.05a-11_i386.deb

If you don't get this:

  a6048e7a8a3901f2621106d540fce61f  
./pool/main/b/bash/bash_2.05a-11_i386.deb

you might want to forget about your 99% certainty and
investigate into this one in a hundred changes.

Cheers

Iota Small


Want to chat instantly with your online friends?  Get the FREE Yahoo!
Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk

Bug#208809: Réf. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread alain . roos 

Thank you very much for that valuable information.

I have also tried to boot with the bf24 image. With the same result.
This confirms Mr. Winter's answer.

However, I did NOT try what sfdisk says when using the bf24 image.
I will try that this week-end and post the result here (if it differs).

May it be possible that only an instable (2.5.xx) kernel works here ?

Does someone know were I could find :
- if the problem has been already been solved ?
- if so, in which kernel version ?

Thank you !

Alain ROOS, Betschdorf, France

alain dot roos at degussa dot com



  
  Steve McIntyre
  
  <[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pour :   [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  m>   cc : 
  
   Objet :  Re: Bug#208809: 
partition problem 
  05/09/2003 11:18  
  

  

  




>On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:57:37AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Package: cdrom
>Version: Debian 3.0 r0 i3
>During installation, Fdisk is not capable of reading the partition table
of
>my 160 GB ide disk

Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
will not support it. I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on
the Woody install CDs will work here, but it's worth a try. At the
boot prompt when starting the installation off CD, use "bf24" and see
if that helps.

--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"C++ ate my sanity" -- Jon Rabone
(See attached file: att4dog4.dat)




att4dog4.dat
Description: Binary data

Re: R?f. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Steve McIntyre 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:43:20AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Thank you both very much for that valuable information.
>
>I have also tried to boot with the bf24 image. With the same result.
>This confirms Mr. Winter's answer.
>
>However, I did NOT try what sfdisk says when using the bf24 image.
>I will try that this week-end and post the result (if it differs).
>
>May it be possible that only an instable (2.5.xx) kernel works here ?
>
>Does someone know were I could find :
>- if the problem has been already been solved ?
>- if so, in which kernel version ?

Unfortunately I've told you all I know, really. I don't use IDE at all
myself, so I don't know all the details here to be able to help _much_
more. However, a quick google search (160GB disk linux kernel)
suggests that 2.4.19 and later may work better. If you have another
system available where you could build a kernel, it should be possible
to build a new set of boot floppies that will support this disk.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.einval.com/steve/>My home page
"Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky,
"Tongue-tied & twisted, Just an earth-bound misfit, I..."


pgp0bFoAuacAm.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Bug#208809: Réf. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Richard Atterer 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:36:54AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> May it be possible that only an instable (2.5.xx) kernel works here ?

No, current 2.4 works. IIRC the relevant code has been present in the main 
kernel tree since 2.4.20 or so.

  Richard

-- 
  __   _
  |_) /|  Richard Atterer |  GnuPG key:
  | \/¯|  http://atterer.net  |  0x888354F7
  ¯ '` ¯

Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread Richard Atterer 
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:18:28AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
> larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
> will not support it.

I can confirm this, I hit the same problem about a year ago.

> I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on the Woody install CDs will
> work here, but it's worth a try.

At the time I installed, bf2.4 didn't help - the relevant patch had not
made it into the main kernel tree, it was only in -ac. But I don't remember
whether bf2.4 used 2.4.16 or 2.4.18 then.

A workaround is to install using a filing system which you can later (once
a newer kernel is installed) grow beyond the 128G mark. These days, AFAIK
ext2, reiserfs and xfs allow resizing of the filesystem - I'd go for 
reiserfs!

In contrast to Alain I started off with an unpartitioned HD, so cfdisk just
reported a size of 128G. Alain, to make cfdisk accept the HD, you should
try deleting _under_Windows_ the partition(s) on the disk which lie beyond
128G (L: AFAICT). The XP partition manager has a nice graphical display of
where the partitions are located on disk, they should be easy to identify

Bug#208809: Réf. : Re: Bug#208809: partition problem

2003-09-05 Thread alain . roos 

I'll try to build a 2.4.20 kernel image and write it down on a floppy.
I suppose that if I use the same root/swap indications as in the kernels
present on the cd
(with rdev), the floppy will continue towards the CD ?

Concerning the proposal to remove all partitions above 128G :
The manufacturer installed all software restoring images in a partition
(Win32 FAT) in
the last 5 Gb of the disk. I'd better not remove that, because the recovery
CD uses
that partition's data to fix issues with the main Win XP partition.

Supposed that the new kernel will support the disk size beyond 128G for
fdisk purposes,
and I will install all stuff beyond 128G, could I loose the last partition
(recovery) when fdisk rewrites
the partition table(s) ?

Thank you : I feel that we are going quicky towards a solution and  that
I've learned a lot today
with all responses I got.

Alain ROOS


wrote :

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:18:28AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Sounds like the kernel is not able to read the full disk. 160GB is
> larger than old-style IDE hardware can address, and so older kernels
> will not support it.

I can confirm this, I hit the same problem about a year ago.

> I'm not sure if the 2.4.18 kernel available on the Woody install CDs will
> work here, but it's worth a try.

At the time I installed, bf2.4 didn't help - the relevant patch had not
made it into the main kernel tree, it was only in -ac. But I don't remember
whether bf2.4 used 2.4.16 or 2.4.18 then.

A workaround is to install using a filing system which you can later (once
a newer kernel is installed) grow beyond the 128G mark. These days, AFAIK
ext2, reiserfs and xfs allow resizing of the filesystem - I'd go for
reiserfs!

In contrast to Alain I started off with an unpartitioned HD, so cfdisk just
reported a size of 128G. Alain, to make cfdisk accept the HD, you should
try deleting _under_Windows_ the partition(s) on the disk which lie beyond
128G (L: AFAICT). The XP partition manager has a nice graphical display of
where the partitions are located on disk, they should be easy to identify.

Cheers,

  Richard

--
  __   _
  |_) /|  Richard Atterer |  GnuPG key:
  | \/¯|  http://atterer.net  |  0x888354F7
  ¯ '` ¯