Re: partitioned drive in linux. Windows gives me a phantom drive letter

From: Spongebob (NadaSpam_at_adelphia.net)
Date: 01/25/05

  • Next message: Ron Johnson: "Re: Programming Languages, "to C or not to C, that is the Q."" 
    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 20:43:12 -0500

    Kent West wrote:

    > Spongebob wrote:
    >
    >>Kent West wrote:
    >>
    >>
    >>>So whereas I still remember that you're having a phantom drive show up
    >>>on a Win98/Linux box with two drives and lots of partitions
    >>>
    >>Hmm...according DOS's fdisk, it's a little out of touch with reality.
    >>
    > MS-DOS's fdisk? Or Win98's fdisk? I'm fairly confident there's probably
    > a difference (large disk support, etc).

    Must be Win98's fdisk, since it asked me about large disk support. I
    invoked it from a DOS shell in windows.

    System Information gives me better information.
    I think maybe the problem is that for hdd, the "reported information" is
    1024 cyl. 64 heads., but the "actual information" is something different.
    Linux's cfdisk shows it as 1024 cyl. and sfdisk says that linux thinks it's
    1024 cyl. but it's actually not. Looking on the disk's label I see that
    windows' "actual information" is correct (and sfdisk agrees).

    How do I correct this (or does it matter)? Linux is the one that thinks the
    disk has 1024 cyl., which it doesn't. I'll need to repartition under linux
    (unless I can keep hdd1, which is the windows root).

    > If it were me, I'd backup all my important stuff and wipe the drives
    > clean and start from scratch. But that's just me; I'd never feel
    > comfortable that something's not wrong at a low level without doing
    > this. Since you have two drives, I'd put Windows on its own drive, and
    > Linux on its own drive. That's not to say that you can't solve your
    > issues without a wipe/rebuild, but I've always felt uncomfortable with
    > systems that have partition anamolies.

    Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to wipe both drives (or even just
    the larger one) without a lot of trouble. Due to various constraints, most
    of windows needs to be on the smaller drive (hdd). But it all won't fit
    (it's only 40G), so some has to go on hda with linux. But seems to be hdd
    which is giving me the phantom drive.

    I could wipe hdd and put nothing but windows stuff on it, if that would
    correct the problem. But some of windows would still need to be on hda. The
    main loss would be having the linux swap on a separate drive.

    Perhaps I should state my objective. Windows has Cakewalk and Soundforge,
    which I use for all of my recording and mixing. The audio data, soundfonts,
    effects panels, and associated stuff takes up a lot of space (60G, maybe).
    The rest of windows is dead weight.

    Linux is the future (for me anyhow). I'm trying to set things up so that
    when the audio stuff is ready for semi-pro use (couple of years I'm
    thinking), I'll be ready and know what I'm doing. I already do most of my
    programming in linux.

    If it would help to wipe hdd, I could. But that's transferring 30G+ around
    twice. That could take a while. And I'd have to know how to make linux read
    the correct drive geometry. 

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