Re: parted and 78 heads

[Mario Gzuk]

Am Dienstag, den 03.10.2006, 21:11 +0200 schrieb address@hidden:
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 08:33:52PM +0200, Mario Gzuk wrote:
> 
> > Hi Leslie,
> >
> > i have forgot to say thank you for the work which you have
> > done already with your projects (not only parted...). So i will do it
> > now: thank you for this good work.
> You're welcome.  I'm content with just the act of contributing things
> that lie within my abilities to my fellow human beings.
> 
> > We have decide to work with parted in our project because with fdisk +
> > mkdosfs we are not able to create a bootable fat partition.... We also
> > try the way 1) create partitions with fdsik 2) format the partition
> > with parted. But this leads in the same error "ntldr not found".
> >
> > Mybe I will try to explain what we do:
> >
> > 1) create a bootable fat32
> > partition
> >
> > 2) replace the voot code in the mbr from the freedos project
> > to boot the active partition
> >
> > 3) replace the boot code in the fat32 partition to load the windows
> > ntldr (to start a windows installation)
> How are you doing number three?

Just saved the bootcode from Sector 1 und 13 and replace it after
formating the drive with the help of "dd":

dd if=/way/to/ntldrbootcodesector0 of=/dev/hda1 bs=1 count=420 seek=90
conv=notrunc
dd if=/way/to/ntldrbootcodesector12 of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 seek=12
conv=notrunc

> 
> >  I think the wrong geometrie in the fat32 partition leads the
> > bootloader to dont find the ntldr....
> 
> > I also try to replace the head and sektors directly in the fat
> > bootsector but with the same effect.
> That's serious and leads me to the conclusion that it is not Parted's
> fault at all.
>   If you did step three from above not by installing Windows, could you
> try it this way and see what the differences are (given that it works
> thus)?

If I install windows directly the heads and sektors in the fat32
partition shows up 255/63. But If you want I can send you the different
boot sectors from the fat partion and the mbr. Maybe you have more
expirience than me.... 
At least I only modify the heads/sektors but not the cylinders. Maybe
thats one reason???

> 
> > (It works when the disk geometrie
> > is 240 heads -> the unattended project haas reported this bug some
> > time ago...)
> What do you mean by "unattended project"?  I'm not sure I understand
> this.
> 
>   What's the problem with setting the geometry to 240 heads?


The project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/unattended has reported
this bug I thought, because here:
http://ubertechnique.com/unattended/NTLDRNotFound
is written:
....
"The parted mailing list has already been informed about this problem"
....

There is also a short report and solution about this problem.

I thought you had heared about that project.... I am working on the
project unattended-gui (http://sourceforge.net/projects/unattended-gui)
which is able for example to install Windows and various Linux
distributions
(http://unattended.technikz.de/index.php/Main_Page#2006-06-20_unattended-gui_release_0.3)
 "unattended". But while the unattended project doesnt seems to develop the 
boot disk any more we decided to make our own.... And we want (and do it) to 
use parted inside this boot disk ;-)

Maybe it will be possible in the future to give parted the same options
like fdisk?
---SNIP---
-C cyls Specify the number of cylinders of the disk.  I have no idea why
anybody would want to do so.
-H heads Specify  the number of heads of the disk. (Not the physical num
ber, of course, but the number used for partition tables.)  Reasonable
values are 255 and 16.
-S sects Specify  the  number of sectors per track of the disk.  (Not
the physical number, of course, but the number  used  for  partition
tables.)  A reasonable value is 63.
---SNAP---


I thought you were also the project leader of fdsik? Or am i wrong?

BTW: excuse my bad english, I hope you understand what I mean....


greetings mario
> 
>   Leslie
>