Large IDE disk problem

[Heid Oliver <oliver heid siemens com>]

Hello everybody,

I got a weird problem with a large (40GB Fujitsu) IDE hard disk in a PC164:
In short, I put a bad OSF disklabel + partitioning scheme on it, which is
now kind of permanent, rendering the disk kind of useless.
During boot (2.4.12 kernel), the disk geometry is seen correctly (~79400 or
so cylinders), but then linux recognizes the OSF disklabel + partitions,
which was created with a broken (=the stock RH7.1, no large-ide patches)
fdisk. That fdisk obviously assumed the geometry was ~13900 cylinders (=
exactly 2^16 less than the true cylinder count). So I applied the large-IDE
patch to fdisk, which now lets me partition the disk with the correct
cylinder count, but the weird thing is the old, unwanted OSF
disklabel/partitioning doesn't get deleted, and is still recognized from
linux. I even tried wiping the disk clean (dd if=/dev/zero on the first 2GB
of the disk), but without sucess.
Does anybody have a clue what to do? I guess the large-ide patch didn't fix
OSF support in fdisk?!

Thanks a lot!
	Oliver