Re: Critical Parted Question

[Jeremy Moles]

I am currently composing a comprehensive bug report on this including
more information than you could ever possibly want. :) Many thanks for
the feedback so far.

I'd really like to get this working--and have some time I could devote
to the parted codebase if needed--since the alternative is either
hacking fdisk itself or feeding values to it a la:

<<EOF


d
1

+20G
EOF

(which I haven't actually tried but am assuming works). At any rate,
I'll have the more comprehensive report tomorrow first thing.

Thanks again. :)

On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 15:24 -0500, Jeremy Moles wrote:
> I have a quick question about parted. I doubt its a bug in parted
> itself; rather, it is more likely that I am simply using it
> incorrectly. :)
> 
> Okay, here goes:
> 
> I use parted in a large bash script to automate a lot of tedious (and
> difficult using any tool that doesn't let me tell it a partition size in
> megabytes) partition manipulation. The process is as follows:
> 
> 1. I receive a machine with a partition table containing Windows and a
> special "Recovery Partition."
> 
> 2. I shrink the windows partition using ntfsresize and then go in using
> fdisk to recreate the partition layout.
> 
> 3. At this point, the recovery partition still works no matter how I get
> in to it (via the BIOS option or using a GRUB CD to boot into it).
> 
> 4. Another step comes through later and uses parted to fill in the
> remaining space with useful stuff; HOWEVER, for some reason, parted
> changes the original disk geometry parameters. For example: the disk
> originally had 240 heads, but after parted "touches" it, this gets
> changed to a value like 16.
> 
> 5. At this point, Windows (hda1) will boot just fine. The recovery
> partition, (hda2), is no longer accessible using the BIOS's recovery
> mechanism--which, for IBMs, is the "Access IBM" button. Additionally,
> any attempt to "use" it results in the standard "Blue Screen of Death."
> 
> Unfortunately, this is irreversible... no matter what I do, I cannot
> recreate the partition (using the original geometry constraints) to make
> the recovery work again.
> 
> My question is: why is parted modifying these values? Is there an
> invocation that says: "don't touch the number of heads, etc." As it
> stands, parted seems to do what it wants to the geometry parameters
> (though, I'm sure smarter people than me wrote parted and have a good
> reason WHY they're doing it :) ), but it's seriously breaking the
> recovery partition.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas?
> 
> 
> 
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