Installation - Possible Bug in2005-04 Installer Partitioner SteveR - 24.08.2006, 05:54 Uhr Titel: Possible Bug in2005-04 Installer Partitioner
After partitioning Hda with the Kanotix installer partitioner with the following order:
Hda1 Win 98 SE on FAT32 10 GB (sizes approximate)
Hda2 / on Reiserfs (Ext2) 7 GB "
Hda3 /Home on Reiserfs (Ext2) 6.8 GB "
Hda4 Swap on Linux swap 0.5 GB "
I installed Kanotix, and ran Ranish Partition Manager to check. The program flagged a "Partition Out of Range" for the final partition.
According to the Ranish CHS display the last (swap) partition was one cylinder too high in number in the table. Reducing the final cylinder number by one brought the partition table into line.
Steps to reproduce:
The partitioner used in Kanotix was the 2005-04 version.
The Ranish PM version was 2.40
When sizing the swap partition I had let the Kanotix partitioner determine the size of the remaining disk space at the end of the disk. I then told it to make that a swap space.
Possible causes:
Either an error generated by bound-checking caused the problem, or the Kanotix partitioner may not have allowed for the fact that cylinders are numbered starting with 0 rather than 1 in determining the last cylinder number......(Or Ranish Partition Manager is reporting incorrectly, thought this is unlikely.)
Kano - 24.08.2006, 11:51 Uhr Titel: RE: Possible Bug in2005-04 Installer Partitioner
Show fdisk -l output. Be sure all partitions are formatted correctly.
SteveR - 24.08.2006, 20:33 Uhr Titel: RE: Possible Bug in2005-04 Installer Partitioner
Ranish Partition Manager showed the total number of disk cylinders as 5167. Cylinder numbering starts with 0 and would end at 5166, if this is correct.
In Kanotix, doing an fdisk -l yields:
Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5168 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes
The disk size is listed here as 5168 cylnders not 5167 and cylinders are numbered starting with 1 rather than zero. Since it's a 40 Gig drive the Kanotix partitioner seems more likely to be right, then?
slam - 24.08.2006, 21:45 Uhr Titel: RE: Possible Bug in2005-04 Installer Partitioner
Who cares for Ranish? Linux' fdisk is always very correct. I can see a problem in your partition table:
What happened to cylinder 1322 - 3306?
Greetings,
Chris
SteveR - 24.08.2006, 23:25 Uhr Titel:
It's intentional Chris, not a problem, it's unused space. Eventually to become a fat32 data partition for win and linux when more than 4 primary partitons are possible in the partitioner.
I didn't want to do logicals off of the main win partition because I want it to be truly seperate from the win sys partiton. I also didn't leave the space temporarily in the win98 system partition, because I'd have to move the data around and divide it off later, which is always risky. There's nothing wrong with unused space in a partitioning scheme.
re: Ranish -- I used it for years ever since Win95 -- maybe this latest version has a problem, I don't know which is correct.
Anyway, I'm not attached to it. I'll be happy to switch to something better. It does give a lot of detailed data in a clear form, and has rescued me from MBR disasters a few times. I've used cfdisk, too following the FAQ here, and it seems easy, though not very detailed in output.
slh - 24.08.2006, 23:39 Uhr Titel:
It will never be possible to have >4 primary partitions or more than >=3 primary and one extended partition as long as the current PC partition labels are in use - and that will be for a lot longer than average life cycle of your next 3 harddisks.
SteveR - 25.08.2006, 01:21 Uhr Titel:
I didn't realize that. I thought I'd read somewhere in the FAQs or elsewhere that there was an intention to increase the number of partitions the manager could create. But looking for it now, I couldn't find it, so I guess I'll rethink the partition scheme.
Anyway the empty space is not a problem, since that seemed to be the concern last post
It may interest you to know that (hate to mention this name again) Ranish Partition Manager 2.37 was creating up to 32 bootable primary partitions quite some time ago. I remember in 1999 I had a 486 with NT4, Win95 and Linux all booting off the same, believe it or not 500 meg drive in compressed mode. I was trying to learn NT and linux, but didn't get far with linux at that time. Hoping to do better this time, for keeps. I apologize if I jumped the gun on a bug in Kanotix -- I'd used Ranish for so long I hadn't thought about the possibility that it was at fault. It's still not certain one way or another, but I favor the idea that the bug is in Ran rather than Kan.