On Sunday 01 February 2004 7:30 pm, Jerry Feldman wrote:
On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 18:06:06 -0600 Stan Glasoe
wrote: I've seen that exact issue here when I thought I had trashed a windows FAT32 or NTFS partition. I thought it may have been a corrupted MBR but it kept happening after I had fdisked and repartitioned it. The drive was bad. It was an IBM and their diagnostics didn't see anything wrong with it. IBM tech support issued an RMA immediately. However, in my case, this only happens when I run the installer. Parted installed on SuSE 9.0 has no problem with it, neither does qtparted when I boot Knoppix. If I had some sort of corroboration with more that one tool, I would be concerned.
-- Jerry Feldman
I have 3 drives to play with. When the one went bad with these errors, parted could READ it just fine but it could not ALTER it unless I did an fdisk booted from floppy or CD. Key here is re-WRITING a change to the partition table once you're booted. IF you are able to re-WRITE a new partition table to that drive while booted to SUSE 9.0, then you have a different problem than I had. I couldn't alter that drive's partition table in SUSE or Windows but I could if I rebooted to floppy or CD and did the whole drive wipe; couldn't fix any single partition, had to do a complete drive wipe. I was trying to change partition sizes for whatever reason and found this issue. I thought it was Windows related because I kept a FAT32 or NTFS partition as the first one on the drive. Took a long while to figure out the drive was bad since several diagnostics couldn't find any errors with it. No bad sectors, no bad writes, no reallocation of bad blocks, no SMART errors, etc. In fact, I have two of these IBM drives and both have failed in the same manner. Both have been replaced, 100% failure rate. Last IBM drives I'll buy... they're Hitachi now, whew! My milage varied... Stan