Disk Druid / linux fdisk warning

[Taavi Burns]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 12:12:24AM -0400, Anton Markov wrote:
> 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.

Aye, it is.  And what the error messages pasted below are saying is that
OLD versions of various fdisk and bootloaders do NOT understand the newer
schemes.  Recent software (the stuff you're using, apparently) does
in fact understand it.  Just don't go trying RH5, okay?  ;)

> 
> 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...

No, just Windows pooching things by writing silly numbers.  It's not at
all backwards compatible with itself.  ;)

-- 
taa
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