Disk Druid / linux fdisk warning

[Anton Markov]

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Hi Chris,

I have been receiving this message since forever, and I have never had
any problem besides the annoying error message. I think that as long as
you keep old operating systems like Windows 98 on the first partition,
you should be fine.

I am no expert on partition tables, so someone correct me if I am wrong,
but here is the explanation I see:

The old scheme to specify the start of a partition used
cylinder/block/head (or something like that), and they were all limited
to a certain ranges (1024 I think). When HDs got too big for this
scheme, they started using LBA and which uses block numbers for access.
Some partitioning tools may be trying to use the old system with new
disks (my fdisk reports 155000+ cylinders on an 80GB HD!) I don't know
if it's an error, or just the software trying to cope with large disks.

Chris Aitken wrote:
> When I use Disk Druid, just before I start partitioning, I get the
> following message:
>
> Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that another
> paritioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it
> didn't have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore, but
> ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders.
>
> Similarly, with linux fdisk I get:
>
> The number of cylinders is set to 2654. There is nothing wrong with
> that, but it is larger than 1024, and could in certain setupscause
> problems with
> 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g. old versions of LILO)
> 2) booting or partitioning software from other OSs (e.g. DOS fdisk, OS/2
> fdisk),
>
> Should I do anything about this? I have been doing a lot of loading of
> various flavours of redhat-type and debian-type OSs (live and installed)
> lately. I wonder if I've pooched something...
>
> Chris

- --
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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