RE: parted's cp command for FAT32, and LBA/CHS/NTLDR missing woes

[Andrew A.]

So, just to be crystal clear, you feel that the fixes to #1 are addressed, but 
that the parted resizing code *could* move NTLDR past
cylinder 1024?  Sure would be nice to add some smarts to parted which would 
keep a given list of files within a given boundary :-)

A.

-----Original Message-----
From: Szakacsits Szabolcs [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 11:58 AM
To: Andrew A.
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: parted's cp command for FAT32, and LBA/CHS/NTLDR missing
woes



On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Andrew A. wrote:

> I write this mostly for intellectual/curiosity reasons, since I've
> already punted and re-installed Win2K from CD.  I am curious to see if
> you believe the recent parted release that fixes CHS/LBA issues would
> prevent/cure the problems I encountered,

Well, it depends. You hit the first or both of these problems:

 1)  CHS was changed in the partition table

 2)  (parts of) NTLDR was moved outside of 1024 cylinders and your
     computer is/was setup to use BIOS for booting.

Andrew worked hard on case 1) and it should be fixed. I've seen several
positive reports so far and no negative one.

> (1) Without touching the partition table on small drive, I used parted
> cp /dev/hdb 1 1 ... to move the large partition down.  It told me I
> needed to free up space.  I rebooted into windows, deleted some large
> files from /dev/hdb and issues the command again. It completed without
> a problem.  Note:  parted complained of a "fixable" problem in the
> partition information on /dev/hdb
>
> Result:  NTLDR missing
>
> (2) I used the sfdisk -H255 solution to "fix" the partition
> information on /dev/hda, thinking that parted might have touched the
> partition information despite the fact that I only asked for a copy
> operation.

It touched, that's what the "fixable problem" message was about.

However the 255 isn't a magic number. Instead, the number of heads must be
used what originally was in the partition table and what parted changed.
Most often it's 255 but there are computers where it's 240 or some other
value.

        Szaka