Re: unrecognised disk label

[clausen]

Tim Cantin wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> I am using parted for the first time, and I have the 23-page documentation.

You think this is too big?  So do I, but it's only going to get bigger
:-(

> Booting from a GNU Parted boot floppy, and running the command "parted" it
> guesses that I have /dev/hda (which is correct; currently a 20GB disk with a
> single Windows 98 partition). It also displays a warning as follows:
> 
> Warning: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is 2482/255/63.
> Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M.  You should check this this 
> matches
> the BIOS geometry before using this program.
> 
> Upon checking the in the BIOS I found that it is set to "Auto", and does not
> show me the geometry it detected... lame!

In this case it probably doesn't matter.  The only case it matters is
when Windows is still using CHS.  However, you can always enable LBA,
in this case (with the LBA flag)

Could have a look a the documentation in parted-1.4.9-pre1 (you'll
find it in the gnu/parted/devel directory on the ftp server/mirrors)

Is this clearer?
 
> So when I type the "print" command in parted's interactive mode I get the
> following error:
> 
> Error: Unable to open /dev/hda - unrecognised disk label

Interesting.  Can you please send me your partition table?
This might be difficult for you to do, because the boot disk doesn't
support FAT - only ext2 - so there's no way to transfer files
(unless you have another GNU/Linux or FreeBSD box ;-)  Oh, and you
can't do it from Windows.

So, do you have a GNU/Linux box handy?
 
> I'm thinking of running the "mklabel msdos" command, but I thought I would ask
> first since the manual doesn't say whether or not that would damage any 
> existing
> partitions. Would it??

Thanks for pointing this out.  I've made the documentation clearer:

2.4.4   mklabel
---------------
        mklabel LABEL-TYPE            create a new disklabel (partition
table)

Creates a new disk label, of type LABEL-TYPE.  The new disk label will
have no
partitions.  This command (normally) won't technically destroy your
data, but
it will make it basically unusable, and you will need to use a program
like
gpart (see section 9) to recover any partitions.  Gpart only works for
msdos
disk labels (AFAIK).  We could/should add this feature to Parted.

Note: everyone seems to have a different word for "disk label" - these
are all
the same thing: partition table, partition map.  Also, the Master Boot
Record onx86 machines is stored in the same sector as Partition Tables
(you don't need toknow this to use Parted)

<snip>

Andrew Clausen