Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2827 mails)

[Dave Plater <dave.plater@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Smits wrote:
> On December 13, 2008 06:33:17 am Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:
>   
> > Hi List,
> >
> > So I downloaded Gparted live cd, booted from it, then successfully shrinked
> > one of my Linux partitions, and formatted it to fat32. It looks like this
> >
> > /dev/sda1     extended               boot, lba
> >     /dev/sda5         linux swap
> >    /dev/sda6 ext3
> >    /dev/sda7 ext3
> > /dev/sda2    fat32
> >
> > But when I insert windows xp sp2 cd and boot from it, it says something
> > like "You have no hard drives attached... "
> >
> > I also tried with NTFS, unallocated, but nothing seems to help. I did a lot
> > of googling (these two days I'm stuck with it), tried different windows
> > cd's. Tried ultimate boot cd...
> >
> > Can you guys please help? I really need to get it working and if you need
> > more information I'd be glad to find it out.
> >
> > It's a thinkpad t61, running opensuse 11 with kde 3.5 (if that matters)
> >
> > Sergey
> > --
> > Sergey Mkrtchyan,
> > Graduate Student @
> > Department of Physics & Astronomy,
> > Faculty of Science, University of Waterloo
> >     
>
> Sergey, I'm running exactly the same setup. I run openSuse 11.0 and dual boot 
> with Win XP on a T61.
>
> This week, all of a sudden, both gparted and partition magic said my drives 
> were not recognizable, both my Windows partition and my openSuse partitions. 
> They still worked and I could boot both OSes, however. 
>
> The partition managing programs could see the partitions on my usb drive just 
> fine, but nothing on the main hd in the laptop. 
>
> I just backed everyhing up to a usb drive, and fixed the hd in the laptop by 
> reinstalling xp from the Lenovo repair disks. This created just an NTFS drive 
> and one 5 GB partition where it stored everything for a future reinstall. 
> Then I could use opensuse gparted to shrink my Windows drive to 25 GB, create 
> a 149 GB extended partition and create /, /home, and swap partions in that.
>
> i haven't been able to identify what caused this to occur. I had recently 
> installed KDE4 for evaluation, switching between 3.5 and 4.0. I had also 
> added Amarok2 just before I noticed what happened to my partitions.  
>
> For now, I suspect this is due to installing KDE4 on a machine that already 
> had KDE3, but I'm not certain about it at all. 
>
> GL, Bob
>   
A possible cause would be bios changing from LBA to CHS if set to AUTO
due to something being altered in the first sector. Its better to set
LBA in the bios before setting the disk up to avoid this problem but
remember that if the bios resets for some reason it defaults to AUTO.
This problem will confuse windows and if a switch between LBA and CHS
occurs Dos based programs ie. Partition Magic may not see your partitions.
Regards
Dave P

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx