[vox-tech] HD Repartition frustration

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Thu 15 Jun 06,  6:37 AM, Donald Greg McGahan <dgmcgahan at sbcglobal.net> said:
> I have a 100Gb Seagate 2.5 inch hard drive that currently has a ntfs
> partition, and extended partition with a fat32 partition within it. I
> wanted to repartition it to a single fat32 partition. I removed it from
> it's (third party) external enclosure and installed it as an secondary
> IDE slave (adapter) in my AMD K7 (1.33MHz) Ubuntu OS box.
> I cannot seem to accomplish this task?!?
> I've tired deleting all of the partitions and then writing but no joy.
> I've been fussing with this on and off for a few days and thought I get
> some help.
> Here is what I'm doing.
> I pop open a terminal window and 
> 
> fdisk /dev/hdd (i've tried both with sudo and sudo su)
> 
> then
> 
> Command (m for help): p
> 
> Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hdd5           10028       12161    17141323+   b  W95 FAT32
> 
> Command (m for help): d
> Partition number (1-5): 5
> 
> Command (m for help): p
> 
> Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> 
> Command (m for help): w
> The partition table has been altered!
> 
> Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
> Syncing disks.
> dig at vill:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/hdd
> 
> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 12161.
> 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)
> 
> Command (m for help): p
> 
> Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hdd5           10028       12161    17141323+   b  W95 FAT32

I was under the impression that BIOS automagically does translation to get
around this.  It uses some geometry for disk I/O and, transparently, a fake
geometry when talking to things like DOS.  There's a "large hard drive"
HOWTO (or something like that) which gives gory details.

If your BIOS is newer than, say, mid-nineties, I don't think this is really
an issue, and hasn't been for over a decade.

Pete