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Hi, I am helping a colleague of mine install Linux on his PC. The PC in question was "inherited" from our boss (who has decided to switch to a Macintosh), and is a pentium machine from a no-name company. The problem we are having is that the hard disk (Western Digital model AC2700, 700 MB) has on it a "Disk Manager" from a company called On-track. This is code that is on the boot sector of the hard disk, supposedly to get around the around the 1024 cylinder problem. (The BIOS is AMIBIOS, which a AMIBIOS date of 07/25/94.) In any case, we couldn't read the partition table, and after calling Western Digital and On-track, we ended up fdisk'ing and formatting the hard disk. The hard disk has 1416 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors, but the BIOS apparently could not handle 1416 cylinders. Under DOS, (with the original BIOS setting of 1415/16/63) fdisk (the DOS version) would show only 500 MB. Worse is that the DOS partition created under the 1416/16/63 setting would give problems under Linux: fdisk (Linux version) would complain about the partition having different physical/logical beginnings and endings, and about not ending on cylinder boundaries. We finally hit on this combination to make everybody happy: BIOS setting: 708 cylinders, 32 heads, 63 sectors Under DOS, boot up was ok, and DOS-fdisk showed 696 MB. Under Linux, boot up showed CHS=708/32/63 (and not 1416/16/63), and Linux's fdisk no longer complains about "different physical/logical beginnings", etc. Now when we boot up with a Linux floppy disk, we get hda: WDC AC2700H, 696 MB w/128KB Cache, LBA, CHS=708/32/63, MaxMult=16 ide0: primary interface on irq 14 But further down the line we get hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x0d { Busy } ide0: do_ide_reset: success hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x0d { Busy } ide0: do_ide_reset: success hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x0d { Busy } end_request: I/O error, dev 0300, sector 0 unable to read partition table of device 0300 After boot up, if we try to mount the MSDOS partition (/dev/hda1) or enable the swap (/dev/hda3), it does not work. Curiously, after booting up, if we go into fdisk and do a "w" (write to the partition table), then we can get to the partitions (enabling swap, and mounting the MSDOS partition). But this change doesn't seem to be permanent, and we have to go through the same maneuver with fdisk every time. By the way, we tried all kinds of combinations with the cylinder/head/sector setting, and with the Linux boot-up options to set the hard disk parameters. So far we *always* get the "unable to read partition table" error. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance. Sidney Li Polaroid Corp. lih at polaroid.com
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