Re: Is it fdisk that's dangerous?

Spinner wrote:
On Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:48:45 -0500, tinkering wrote:

Well I'll be!

I don't mean the loss of the bundled OS, I mean that all of a sudden I
discover that fdisk has always been broken and that I must in deed be
one of the very few lucky ones who in 10 years or more of continous use
have never EVER had any problems with fdisk at all.

I'm no guru, maybe some experts can comment on the numbers cited below.
I'd be curious because if fdisk is this bad than maybe I should just use
Vista and those cute dialogs.



--------------
PowerQuest EasyRestore has detected an error 116 on the partition
starting at sector 21655620 on disk 1. The starting LBA value is
21655620 and the CHS value is 16450559. The LBA and CHS values must be
equal. PowerQuest EasyRestore has verified that the LBA value is correct
and can fix the CHS value. This will destroy all data on the hard disk
and restore the operating system and applications originally
preinstalled on your drive
---------------------------------------------------------

PowerQuest's Partition Magic used to report this very same error and
offer to fix it. The Linux and BSD guys said that Partition Magic was
computing its numbers wrong, and Partition Magic fans said the linux &
BSD guys were the ones doing it all wrong. The technical arguments
would rage for weeks but I never bothered to follow them because I'd
personally seen Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD work fine for years on
partitions that Partition Magic deemed to have bad CHS values. In
every one of these cases, double- and triple-checking with a variety
of other partitioning tools failed to turn up any problems.


Aaaaah, YOU the man, Spinner, you the man! There are three utis that every self-respecting linuxer must know inside out and fdisk is one of them (grub & dd are the other two ..or lio).

Of COURSE there's NOTHING wrong with fdisk, I've partitionned
hundreds of disks with it, disks that cfdisk and PM had screwed up!

That recoveryware isn't some 3rd party snake oil, it's the Toshita
XP-OD that wants to reclaim all of the disk to prevent another OS
form being there. What I was asking myself (or whover would know)
is if there's any relationship between a little + sign denoting
a wipe-safe sector or half block that a filesystem can neither normally use nor wipe, and $trangleware? The only time that little fart can be wiped is with dd when the whole disk is 1 partition and even then I'm not sure (maybe with 512 block size). I've always suspected that it would be best to keep the + in the least survivable place, swap sounding ideal, and have been doing so for over a decade.

So let's hear from the truly wicked ones, how they think they
could exploit it because that's sure to be the way that it IS being exploited.

.