Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4237 mails)

[Sid Boyce <sboyce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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=====