Jerry Feldman wrote:

I don't know why YaST (or Parted) was unable to read the partition table, since I had no problem booting or mounting those filesystems (root, /home, /usr/local).

What's your linux filesystem? Is it ext2 or reiser or something else? One reason I always use ext2 is because pqmagic only supports ext2. So far I encountered no corruption problem (it's not like I repartition every day ;-), except that linux's fdisk (e.g. to set active partition) will "correct" the order of partition. Rgds, Verdi -- +++ GMX - die erste Adresse für Mail, Message, More +++ Neu: Preissenkung für MMS und FreeMMS! http://www.gmx.net

On Mon January 5 2004 12:07 am, mjt wrote:

On Sun, 4 Jan 2004 23:31:26 -0500, "Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:

...

I have a hard drive that works perfectly well under Linux but Partition Magic thinks it's incorrectly formatted. I've heard that there's some disagreement between PowerQuest (the company that wrote PM) and the Linux world over what the correct format of a partition table is; each thinks the other has it wrong. Does anyone on this list know about the disagreement and the best way to get around it? (The SuSE database yields nothing.)

... i've used PM for quite a long time and recently got frustrated at its slant to the microsoft world. i gave up on it and system commander ... quite frankly, i dont care what PM reports anymore :)

PM would report errors - none of those errors were correctible by PM (though they claim they'd be fixable).

you just have to weight the options [of the tools' with the outcomes for your particular situation and make a decision :) IOW, what is the predominate system on your box and what is its dependency on a tool such as PM?

Another option is the Acronis Partition Expert... which also supports most of the linux FS's. And it uses a linux kernel as it's base even though it sometimes looks like a Windows program. The only FS it doesn't handle is XFS (JFS too?) and I expect that it will whenever they switch to a kernel that natively supports XFS. But I think you'll find that it plays nicely with the linux partition tables. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 01/05/04 09:38 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Tracey's Time Observation: "Good times end too quickly. Bad times go on forever."

Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

On Monday 05 January 2004 12:07 am, mjt wrote:

...

... i've used Partition Magic for quite a long time and recently got

frustrated

...

at its slant to the microsoft world. i gave up on it and system commander ... quite frankly, i dont care what PM reports anymore :)

Are there any Linux alternatives to PM that offer the same functionality, including resizing and moving Windows partitions? (PM doesn't handle Reiser or even ext3, so it falls down in that respect.)

Paul Abrahams

I have used Partition Commander 6 and 8. * allows resizing of at least ext2 and 3 and I believe Reiser (not personally done that though). It is available from v-com.com. It has worked just fine for me. Works on Windows as well as Linux.

Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

[snip]

Are there any Linux alternatives to PM that offer the same functionality, including resizing and moving Windows partitions? (PM doesn't handle Reiser or even ext3, so it falls down in that respect.)

I use Acronis Partition Expert, which understands more formats than I have heard of. It happily recognises Linux swap parts and Reiser parts. (As do all the Acronis tools, they install cygwin as part of their main install which is presumably why they can handle it) I haven't tried it on anything mission critical yet, but if you can wait a few days I will have used it to do a resize/move on a Reiser part. -- Tim Nicholson BBCi at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system. Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately. Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received. Further communication will signify your consent to this.

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 14:17:02 -0500, "Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:

...

I use Acronis Partition Expert, which understands more formats than I have heard of. It happily recognises Linux swap parts and Reiser parts. (As do all the Acronis tools, they install cygwin as part of their main install which is presumably why they can handle it)

My concern with any of the alternatives to Partition Magic is that they might run into the same problem as Partition Magic with an existing hard drive: Linux fdisk thinks it's OK but PM finds its partition table unreadable.

... then maybe you use 30-day eval and test any tool you feel might work.

I'd end up having bought software that is useless to me.

...that's what i was saying earlier. you have to decide which side of the camp is most beneficial for you, then choose the tool that best fits that camp (Linux, etc). i thought i was using a tool that would assist me. although i understand all the low-level partitioning, i want something that will get me working quickly and with a minimum of fuss. PM for Linux partitioning does not work, IMO, so i tossed PM.

And, of course, low-level tinkering with partition tables can be very, very hazardous, especially if you're not entirely sure of what you're doing.

true statement. i've done all that; i've done some slicing that put me on the edge of the seat - try resizing a partition with a filesystem *IN PLACE* :) talk about a nervous breakdown!

To add to the unpleasantness of my situation: the drive in question is an 80GB-er about 65% full, so backing it up completely and rebuilding it isn't an option.

... i'd go buy another drive and back it up!!!!

But nevertheless I'll ask the question: can anyone point me to a definitive standard for partition tables?

... that's the prob - there is NO standard. although the information about drives and how they're sliced, there are many other variables at work which complicates matters. and each vendor is free to interpret how THEY want to deal with a drive and partitioning it. -- << http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/ >> I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses. - Victor Hugo

Hi guys I used Partition Commander 8 to establish the partitioning I needed for the install of SuSE 8.2. I don't know if any of you found the same problem of conflicts between partition software - in my case PC8 - and linux bootloader (GRUB)- but I found it essential to uninstall PC8 after configuration of the partitions and prior to the installation of SuSE 8.2. I learnt this the hard way having to reinstall all the software!! Not sure if this will help you with your install. Humvee On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 01:38, mjt wrote:

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 19:28:36 -0600, mjt wrote:

... sorry, i forgot a word or two:

...

... that's the prob - there is NO standard. although the information about drives and how they're sliced

..................................... is well understood,

...

there are many other variables at work which complicates matters. and each vendor is free to interpret how THEY want to deal with a drive and partitioning it.

-- << http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/ >> The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose. -- David Lardner

Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

On Monday 05 January 2004 12:07 am, mjt wrote:

...

... i've used Partition Magic for quite a long time and recently got

frustrated

...

at its slant to the microsoft world. i gave up on it and system commander ... quite frankly, i dont care what PM reports anymore :)

Are there any Linux alternatives to PM that offer the same functionality, including resizing and moving Windows partitions? (PM doesn't handle Reiser or even ext3, so it falls down in that respect.)

Paul Abrahams

I have used PM for years and never had a problem. Recently used it to resize an NTFS windo$ XP partition on a DELL I1100 laptop. I only use PM to shrink the partition and create unalocated space and use the distribution to create the swap and ext2 or ext3 partition. Works every time. jozien

On Wednesday 04 August 2004 11:58 pm, Felix Miata wrote:

The ultimate solution is a partitioner that runs natively under most or all the operating systems for which it supports native formats. I don't know of any that do all, but DFSee currently runs under windoze, OS/2 & DOS, and supports ext2/ext3. It's Linux port is in development, and expected in under a year from now, maybe only a few months. It has excellent author support, and appears to suffer from no result gotchas, only a steeper learning curve than is popular, and a license fee for continued use and support. URL below includes relevant DFSee links, as well as much other useful partitioning info. --

I'd rather not run a partitioner at the same time I'm running an OS. Too many things can go wrong and quite often you're faced with a need to run it on bare-metal anyway.... I prefer stand-alone. No one has mentioned Acronis Disk Director which run a linux kernel and supports almost all of the file formats except XFS. And XFS will be coming along as soon as they implement a later kernel. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 08/05/04 09:44 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with."

I used to bring partition Magic to all our installfests, but now I use QTParted booting from a Linux bootable CD (in this case Knoppix). QTParted has some limitations that partition Magic does not have, but it does understand NTFS and ReiserFS. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Thursday 05 August 2004 18:46, Brian Pack wrote:

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 18:19, Jerry Feldman wrote:

...

I used to bring partition Magic to all our installfests, but now I use QTParted booting from a Linux bootable CD (in this case Knoppix). QTParted has some limitations that partition Magic does not have, but it does understand NTFS and ReiserFS.

I've used Partition Magic 8 for all my Linux installs for the past year. I've even taken GBs away from xp and given it to SuSE with nary a grumble.

Please translate "GBs" for us. Thanx. --doug

OK. I guess if it just said GB, I might have understood it. I did spend my working life as an RF engineer! --dm On Thursday 05 August 2004 19:30, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* Doug McGarrett [08-05-04 18:26]:

...

Please translate "GBs" for us. Thanx. --doug

gigabyte ??

-- Patrick Shanahan Registered Linux User #207535 http://wahoo.no-ip.org @ http://counter.li.org

Doug McGarrett wrote:

On Thursday 05 August 2004 18:46, Brian Pack wrote:

...

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 18:19, Jerry Feldman wrote:

...

I used to bring partition Magic to all our installfests, but now I use QTParted booting from a Linux bootable CD (in this case Knoppix). QTParted has some limitations that partition Magic does not have, but it does understand NTFS and ReiserFS.

I've used Partition Magic 8 for all my Linux installs for the past year. I've even taken GBs away from xp and given it to SuSE with nary a grumble.

Please translate "GBs" for us. Thanx. --doug

I'd bet my next paycheck he meant gigabytes. :) -- Jim Sabatke Hire Me!! - See my resume at http://my.execpc.com/~jsabatke Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup. NOTE: Please do not email me any attachments with Microsoft extensions. They are deleted on my ISP's server before I ever see them, and no bounce message is sent.

On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 18:46:17 -0400 Brian Pack wrote:

I've used Partition Magic 8 for all my Linux installs for the past year. I've even taken GBs away from xp and given it to SuSE with nary a grumble. As I mentioned, I was (and still am) a big fan of PM, but I now have confidence in GNU Parted (and QTParted that uses the GNU libraries). -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

John S. Wolter wrote:

Paul:

I've experienced your PM problem as well. It is no doubt true MS has its own ideas about disk layouts. I do not have the detail of the difference in the the LINUX world's and MS's view of partition formats. I was under pressure to get a project done so I picked up Partition Commander(PC) from VCOM, Inc. It has explicit support for ext2, ext3, and ReiserFS.

I first learned about partitioning in MSDOS and it's never been a mystery since. Linux, Solaris, they look pretty much the same to me, perhaps I suffer from myopia or some such affliction.

I used PC for ext3 imaging as I worked through an Upgrade problem so as to save the current state of a production harddrive. It worked for me although the product does have a Windoze slant, some features need to be turned off. Page 53 of the Box product manual has a list of things I did not need for creating and copying ext3 partitions. Turning off some of those features shorten the partition coping from 4 hours to 40 minutes. Also when it copied partitions from one drive to another it had the annoying habit of Hiding the partition to "Keep the drive letters the same". Why for ext3 partitions? You have to manually unhide primary partitions, the extended primary partition does not suffer this issue. I do not know. Well, I got the job done but was not sure about all the problems. A further issue relates to the way the SUSE partitioner works and the error messages I saw coming from the LINUX fdisk utility. The difference in the way LINUX partitioner actually sets up a partition. My disks, two 40 GByte Maxtors, are configured in my ASUS A7N8X-E as Auto which is LBA which you know about already. I partitioned the first using the SUSE install YaST text mode which I prefer. It appeared very sequential, almost like it was partitioning using the raw Cylinders, Heads, and Sectors. It looked different inside PC. Once PC made a copy of the primary disk's to the secondary disk, PC reported very different Cylinders, Heads, and Sectors allocations. I just may be that these two partitions are different!

I'm to busy to get out a raw disk editor, in fact I don't know one to use. I will find one or maybe someone could suggest one. GNU's parted is another partitioning utility whose manual I've printed but not read. It is high on my list of to do's in the next few days. It is worth a look as it is scriptable and could also be used in system recovery after a complete wipe out.

It would be good if some knows where to find information about these different disk formats. Good luck

For cloning the two 40G drives as masters on separate IDE interfaces, I'd simply use "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k" and go shopping.

Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

...

I have a hard drive that works perfectly well under Linux but Partition Magic thinks it's incorrectly formatted. I've heard that there's some disagreement between PowerQuest (the company that wrote PM) and the Linux world over what the correct format of a partition table is; each thinks the other has it wrong. Does anyone on this list know about the disagreement and the best way to get around it? (The SuSE database yields nothing.)

Paul Abrahams

Some partitioners complicate a very simple operation. Some weeks ago an ex-colleague and I installed SuSE 9.0 on his machine which was using what he considered the bees knees in partitioning software, it understood ext3, but not reiserfs and refused to boot SuSE - unknown partition and operating system. Now it was OK with RedHat and Mandrake which were both ext3. We found we had to install grub in the SuSE partition, then it recognised it as Linux, unknown partition and booted without problems. We've never experienced problems with dual boot machines where there was just the standard Windows partitioner available. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer =====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====

Ok, here we go again: I just decided to give a try to GNU parted. Yep, error message, so I stopped. Here's parted's startup message. "Error: The partition table on /dev/hda is inconsistent. There are many reasons why this might be the case. However, the most likely reason is that Linux detected the BIOS geometry for /dev/hda incorrectly." [Bad parted]. "GNU Parted suspects the real geometry should be 4866/255/63 (not 77557/16/53)." [cyls/heads/sectors?]. "You should check with your BIOS first, as this may not be correct. You can inform LINUX by adding the documetation for mor information. If you think Parted's suggested geometry is correct, you may select Ignore to continue (and fix LINUX later). Otherwise, select Cancel (and fix LINUX and/or the BIOS now)." Selecting Cancel... "Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is 77557/16/63. Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 503.999M." I also used Partition Commander to make drive copies and got the following as geometry from its information window. Cylinders: 4866 ....Heads: 255 ..Sectors: 63 The BIOS has multiple reports. When set to Access Mode = Auto Cylinders: 19161 ....Heads: 16 ..Sectors: 255 When set to Access Mode = LBA Cylinders: 4866 ....Heads: 255 ..Sectors: 63 When set to Access Mode = Large Cylinders: 1277 ....Heads: 240 ..Sectors: 255 Interesting results. Which information is right? The real way to find out is to get out your favorite low level disk editor and see what is where. Since I have a blank target drive and I'm short of time, it's time to throw caution to the wind a see what happens. On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 23:13:38 -0700 Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 03:57, Sid Boyce wrote: <SNIP>

...

...

For cloning the two 40G drives as masters on separate IDE interfaces, I'd simply use "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k" and go shopping. <SNIP> Are you copying one drive partitions and information to another?

...

We've never experienced problems with dual boot machines where there was just the standard Windows partitioner available. Regards Sid.

I am told there is a difference of opinion about partition marking between *nix and windows. We can handle their markers but they have issues with our sequence. Various solutions seem to be reformatting the Windows partitions with their format even though qtparted can do that.

Knoppix 3.4 is out but I dont know if the partition problem has been fixed.

I have used PM and find it very slow if you set it to do a drive you basically go to breakfast and it will be done after dinner. qtparted while requiring things done is stages takes only minutes. You partition then format with qtparted and on a 20 gig drive only 10 minutes on a PII.

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