bug#20746: problem with non-LBA fat16

[George Hicken]

Requested output prior to partitioning

Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label

Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label

Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label

Model: VMware Virtual disk (scsi)

Disk /dev/sdb: 8590MB

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B

Partition Table: unknown

Disk Flags:

Model: VMware Virtual disk (scsi)

Disk /dev/sdb: 16777216s

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B

Partition Table: unknown

Disk Flags:

Model: VMware Virtual disk (scsi)

Disk /dev/sdb: 1044,85,0

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B

BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 1044,255,63.  Each cylinder is 8225kB.

Partition Table: unknown

Disk Flags:

Using the parted supplied with tinycorelinux 6.x (reports as 3.1) to create an MBT, create a primary fat16 parition with non-lba addressing

   /usr/local/sbin/parted -a cylinder -s /dev/sdb --  mklabel msdos mkpart primary fat16 1cyl 40MiB 

This produces a partition of type 0xe, but otherwise it's what we want - interestingly parted print command doesn't detail the parition type, it's all blank. Using "set 1 lba off" then does something entirely unexpected. Using fdisk to inspect the partition table the type has switched to 0x83.

I took a quick look at the code and 0x83 appears to be the default fstype if none is set. Why this happens when setting lba off on a fat16 partition I have no idea.

Thanks.

George