MBR troubles, perhaps.
From: Petri Järvenpää (Petri.S.Jarvenpaa_at_nokia.com)
Date: 07/30/04
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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 08:15:53 GMT
Hello and please forgive me if this subject is already done to death, but
I´m getting desperate.
Last week I installed Fedora Core 2 on my Windows XP box, I decided to make
it dualboot. I had heard of the famous dualboot-partition table mess that
Fedora Core 2 makes when installing it, but I found a guide that seemed
reasonable easy to follow, guess I was wrong.
I have two hd´s in my box, other is 120GB Westerd Digital partitioned as
follows:
-10GB for windows (NTFS)
-100GB for apps, games, downloads etc.(NTFS)
-10GB for shared usage between windows and linux (FAT32)
The second hd was(was indeed, it died) 20GB IBM Deathstar, partitioned the
"easy" way:
-100MB for boot
-512MB for swap
-rest for root
Installing the fedora I followed the guide and booted from the rescue-cd and
issued the command (fdisk -l /dev/hda and same for the other hd also). After
that I rebooted and entered the installation with following command (linux
hda=xxxxxx,zzz,yy hdb=xxxxxx,zzz,yy <- xzy meaning the cylinders, sectors
and heads respectively). The installation went fine, I decided to play it
safe and installed the bootloader on the MBR of the second hd, the
Deathstar.
After installation I noticed that I had failed and the bootloader couldn´t
boot to windows anymore. Luckily I could boot into both OS´s just by
changing the order in which drives boot, in BIOS.
Then I decided to try and fix this with the commands found from the guide.
first 'sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda' then
'sfdisk -d /dev/hda' . This did not fix the issue however, I even think I
made things worse in this part, my own fault, I agree.
After this, few days later my second HD died, it was 4 yeards old and it was
IBM, so I was not suprised, but little disappointed since I had my Fedora
all ready to go. This is not what I´m writing this post for.
Main reason for my gripes is that now the BIOS autodetect for this first HDD
takes very long and cant detect it half the time. Also what BIOS autodetects
as it´s settings now are not what the command 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' told me
earlier. Curious about that I checked the Western Digitals homepage and it
too lists completely different values for cylinders, sectors and heads. And
when I say completely different, I mean different from what the 'fdisk -l
/dev/hda' reported and what the BIOS is now reporting. So now I am wandering
which ones are the correct settings for my hdd?
I tried to "cure" this odd auto-detect behaviour (which worked flawlesly
befora btw) by removing my partitions from my 120GB drive and doing
fdisk/mbr from windows98 bootdisk. I read this somewhere and they suggested
this would write MBR back to its factory settings, no luck though.
So basically, bottom line, I messed up my partition table by giving possibly
wrond settings during the linux installation or after it when I tried to fix
this. How do I perform somekind of low-level-format on the drive so that the
MBR partition table gets written back to its original form and settings?
Sorry for this lenghty post and my bad english.
Cheers,
Petri Järvenpää
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