Re: hard drive problem

[Matthew Saltzman <mjs math clemson edu>]

Vinay Bharel <vinay bharel com> wrote:

>When I partitoned my hd for linux, apparently the partitions, instead
>of being named like hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 got named as hda1 hda5 hda6
>hda7.  When I try to run Partition Magic, it gives a PARTITION TABLE
>ERROR #120 error. 
>
>My question is, how can I, resolve this problem without completely
>formatting and deleting all the partitions on the hd.

The naming convention is what you see when you have a primary 
partition (hda1) and an extended partition containing logical 
partitions (hda5, hda6, ...).  This seems to be something that
Disk Druid likes to do.

The PartitionMagic manual says ERROR #120 means that the logical
partitions are not chained in increasing sequence number order, as
required by DOS/Win-xx.  The solution that they recommend is to back
up your partitions and recreate them, being sure to create them
in sequence-number order.

I'm not quite sure how you get into this situation, but I'd consider
it a design flaw of Disk Druid or the Linux fdisk program.  Although
Linux doesn't care what order logical partitions are chained in, these
utilities are being used by people who will be dual-booting running
OS's that *do* care.  Having low-level disk utilities that are not
friendly to those OS's is just inviting problems and hostility from
users (vast numbers of them) who aren't sophisticated about low-level
disk issues.

BTW, be careful (i.e., back up first) when moving or resizing Linux
partitions with PM4.0.  I have seen reports of problems, here and in
the Linux Journal review.

		Matthew Saltzman
		Clemson University Math Sciences
		mjs clemson edu
		http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs