There is a known flaw in the version of parted shipped with suse 9.1, and possibly 9.0, which leads to strangeness reading LBA drives. I ran into this problem a couple of weeks ago, and there is a fix posted on the Suse web site. I don't know if that is your problem (one of th esymptoms is that the computer won't boot into windows after Suse has been installed) but it might be worth looking at. The diagnostic for me was that yast crashed with a segfault every time I tried to run the partition manager sectio of it, which clearly relies on parted. If you google the archives of this list for a message headed "sudden excitement in a partition table" you'll find what I did to fix it. On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 01:37:24 -0600, Mark McKibben <manzabar@mchsi.com> wrote:

On Sunday 26 December 2004 6:58 pm, Sunny wrote:

...

On Sunday 26 December 2004 16:46, Mark McKibben wrote:

...

On Sunday 26 December 2004 4:29 pm, Sunny wrote:

...

Hi, as your fstab entry looks OK to me (I don't have the utf stuff only), and as you say that WinME have dies, maybe the file system is broken.

Windows was loaded on the same drive that now holds Linux. The drive I can't get to mount only held data; so that doesn't seem likely.

If it died while writting to that disk, it doesn't matter where it was booted. It may just leave the filesystem in incorrect/bad state.

I was able to get her info Safe mode for a while and she was then able to copy files from C (/dev/hda) to D (/dev/hdb). Using that ultimate boot cd, I was able to work with the drive under FreeDOS but not under Linux. I did some more googling and I'm wondering if Linux is reading the cylinder info for the drive differently than WinME did? And if so, how would I fix that, without losing all the data on the drive?

The reason I think Linux & WinME might be reading the cylinders differently is due to the following output that I got from sfdisk -l /dev/hdb ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

# sfdisk -l /dev/hdb

Disk /dev/hdb: 14946 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 0+ 14945 14946- 120053713+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (609,254,63) /dev/hdb2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hdb3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hdb4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Of course, I fully expect that I'm probably wrong and that being the case; below I've included all the info that I can think of to try helping you help me figure out what to do. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

# fdisk /dev/hdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 14946. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdb: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 14946 120053713+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

# fdisk -l /dev/hdb1

Disk /dev/hdb1: 122.9 GB, 122935002624 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14945 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1p1 ? 120513 235786 925929529+ 68 Unknown Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/hdb1p2 ? 82801 116350 269488144 79 Unknown Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/hdb1p3 ? 33551 120595 699181456 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux3 Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/hdb1p4 ? 86812 86813 10668+ 49 Unknown Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

# dosfsck /dev/hdb dosfsck 2.9, 15 May 2003, FAT32, LFN Currently, only 1 or 2 FATs are supported, not 191.

# dosfsck /dev/hdb1 dosfsck 2.9, 15 May 2003, FAT32, LFN File system has 3750762 clusters but only space for 3749886 FAT entries.

# sfdisk -l /dev/hdb

Disk /dev/hdb: 14946 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 0+ 14945 14946- 120053713+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (609,254,63) /dev/hdb2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hdb3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hdb4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

# sfdisk -d /dev/hdb # partition table of /dev/hdb unit: sectors

/dev/hdb1 : start= 63, size=240107427, Id= c, bootable /dev/hdb2 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 /dev/hdb3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 /dev/hdb4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0

# cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name rio rmerge rsect ruse wio wmerge wsect wuse running use aveq

3 0 30015216 hda 5463 11019 131072 285030 905 2149 24472 51149 0 30510 336180 3 1 514048 hda1 2 3 16 8 0 0 0 0 0 8 8 3 2 29495340 hda2 5454 10987 131000 284946 905 2149 24472 51149 0 30436 336096 3 64 120060864 hdb 45 283 576 174 0 0 0 0 0 174 174 3 65 120053713 hdb1 11 57 72 55 0 0 0 0 0 55 55

# cat /proc/ide/hdb/settings name value min max mode ---- ----- --- --- ---- acoustic 0 0 254 rw address 0 0 2 rw bios_cyl 14946 0 65535 rw bios_head 255 0 255 rw bios_sect 63 0 63 rw breada_readahead 8 0 255 rw bswap 0 0 1 r current_speed 69 0 70 rw failures 0 0 65535 rw file_readahead 508 0 16384 rw init_speed 12 0 70 rw io_32bit 1 0 3 rw keepsettings 0 0 1 rw lun 0 0 7 rw max_failures 1 0 65535 rw max_kb_per_request 128 1 255 rw multcount 16 0 16 rw nice1 1 0 1 rw nowerr 0 0 1 rw number 1 0 3 rw pio_mode write-only 0 255 w slow 0 0 1 rw unmaskirq 1 0 1 rw using_dma 1 0 1 rw wcache 0 0 1 rw

-- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

Mark McKibben http://www.coffeebear.net/

-- Andrew Brown What I do: www.darwinwars.com What I'm up to: www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/