Partitioning problem with windows vs. linux

[Jeff Vian]

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 21:13 -0400, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 17:47 -0500, Shawn Iverson wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 31, 2005 3:45 PM, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> > >
> > >So somehow w2k is getting seriously confused on my system ... 
> > >turning on /bootlog and /sos in w2k boot.ini and removing 
> > >/fastdetect was not illuminating. I took dd snapshots at each 
> > >step with Knoppix. Does anyone know of a good hexeditor that I 
> > >could view them in or ideally compare two binary files? My 
> > >next step is to experiment with hidden partition types. If 
> > >that works I will file an RFE against anaconda to write more 
> > >failsafe grub rules by hiding the linux partitions. 
> > >Preliminary experiments would indicate that changing the 
> > >partition to a hidden type doesn't help. I am not sure if that 
> > >is all the "hide" command does in grub.
> > >
> > 
> > Are you using LVM?  W2k might mistake it for a Windows volume due to the
> > partition filesystem type.  W2k could be performing a sanity check and
> > whacking out at the presence of the foreign partition.  Try partitioning
> > the second one type ext3 or Reiser to see if that helps.
> 
> I am not formating the partition in any way. I am just adding a new
> empty one using fdisk and no matter what "partition type" I choose, w2k
> hates it ... even if I choose type 07 which is NTFS. When I first
> encountered the problem while installing Fedora, I had manually made
> several partitions and had them formatted ext3. Fedora would boot and
> run fine but then w2k would not. I have stripped away little by little
> to see where the problem is located and it appears that it is having
> issues when just an empty partition is added. This is really unusual
> since w2k shouldn't care how the rest of the drive is partitioned so
> long as it was the first partition.
> 

There was a time when installing dual boot with FC (I think version 3)
would break a disk that had been working fine with windows.  That had to
do with LBA and there was a workaround that had to be used to avoid
losing access to the windows install.

This seems similar, in that windows sees a change in the partition table
and it then cannot access it's own partition to boot.  It expects the
partitions to end on certain boundaries and Linux uses different
boundaries so the table is "corrupt" as far as windows can tell.

I had a similar situation on one drive and the fix I used was to
repartition the entire drive with Linux, reinstall windows in /dev/hda1
and then install Linux.  That worked, but was also a bit drastic.
I thought about installing a second drive for the Linux install but
chose the reinstall instead.


> Displaying the output of sfdisk -d /dev/sda
> This is the partition table that is fine:
> # partition table of /dev/sda
> unit: sectors
> 
> /dev/sda1 : start=       63, size=292977342, Id= 7, bootable
> /dev/sda2 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
> /dev/sda3 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
> /dev/sda4 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
> 
> This is the partition table that barfs:
> # partition table of /dev/sda
> unit: sectors
> 
> /dev/sda1 : start=       63, size=292977342, Id= 7, bootable
> /dev/sda2 : start=292977405, size=195302205, Id=83
> /dev/sda3 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
> /dev/sda4 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
> 
> 
> Just for the morbidly curious, this is the partition table after FIXBOOT
> has its way with it:
> # partition table of /dev/sda
> unit: sectors
> 
> /dev/sda1 : start=218129509, size=1701990410, Id=72
> /dev/sda2 : start=729050177, size=543974724, Id=74
> /dev/sda3 : start=168653938, size=        0, Id=65
> /dev/sda4 : start=2692939776, size=    51635, Id= 0
> 
> I know about the problem with the installer messing with the CHS
> geometry and w2k not liking that but I believe that I have ruled that
> out since the stated geometry as displayed by fdisk -l /dev/sda stays
> the same all the time.
> 
> I thought that big disk problems were a thing of the past. Am I wrong
> about that? I did notice that the w2k installer can't handle
> partitioning this drive since the max partition size that I could
> specify was 99.999 GB so I actually installed w2k into a partition pre-
> made by linux fdisk in the first place.
> 
> I am baffled by the behaviour of this machine :[
> 
> /Mike
>