Re: Setup problems - fdisk, overlapping sectors?

matthewt_at_gmail.com
Date: 10/03/05 

Date: 3 Oct 2005 11:42:30 -0700

To recap - having problems w/ a small appliance type machine running a
Via processor and Epia motherboard. I have used these before w/ 20gig
drives, no problem. I have 2 more and 2 Samsung 40gb drives and am now
having problems. No distros would boot w/out ide=nodma. Then when I try
to partition the drive using fdisk, it appears to work, but does not
actually "save" the table after I exit.

Some updates - I can get the system to boot using a Knoppix dervied
Live CD w/out specifying ide=nodma. Now when I run fdisk and partition
the drives - same problem. Some people suggested I jot down the
partition table using fdisk, then use hexdump to compare after I exit.

I did this (hexdump -C -n 1024 /dev/hdc) and the table is not the same.
It's almost as if the drive won't write when I exit. The other odd
thing, if I make 3 partitions - say a 32M /boot, a 512M swap and the
remainder dedicated to / and save, when I exit and look again it
appears as if the hdc2 and hdc3 overlap sectors. Something is wrong
with how the machine is reading the disk...

Any ideas here? Bios seems to recognize the drive using LBA or auto. I
have also tried manually setting the cylinders, heads and sectors using
fdisk.

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