can't start cfdisk

Forum: HD Install
Topic: can't start cfdisk
started by: I went to bed very late

Posted by I went to bed very late on Nov. 11 2004,17:39

I just wanted to activate the swap-partition because i have not worked until now.

I did the following rhings:
- a boot part 10megs, (Done during Debian installation)
- linux type 83
- swap type "I don't know"
- hd-install of DSL 0.8.0

It worked fine. Then I added another HDD (FAT32).
Now I cannot enter cfdisk anymore.

Do I have to disable the other HDD or is there a way repairing it by software.

The error is something like the following (The end of partition 5 (?) is behind the partition) or similar.

Posted by still in bed on Nov. 15 2004,14:24

ok now i Know there is really something really wrong.

A friend told me the root should not be installed on /hda as it is in my case. fdisk shows me also a partition type 7c type unknown.

Is there a possibility to repair this?

Posted by AwPhuch on Nov. 15 2004,19:38

linux swap is 82
Its telling you DSL doesnt see the fat32 HD correclty?
If it is formatted properly it should autoload it into fstab for you to mount

perhaps checking the jumpers on the drive, it might be set as master when it should be slave

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by I went to bed very late on Nov. 17 2004,13:22

The jumper are o.k.
Previously there was installed a debian wchich propposed to install a boot partition about 10 mb (for older drives) and a swap partition which seems to be type 7c.

There is no fat32 partition on the disc. The second disc contains a fat16 partition.
The partition type 7c is on disc hda and is displayed the same way when booting without the second disc (when taking away the IDE cable of HDD2 (fat16)).

Sorry, my writes are veryshambolic today.

Posted by AwPhuch on Nov. 17 2004,18:27

very strange...I wonder if perhaps your IDE cable is bad or something...I havent ever heard of a 7c partition type...odd

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by ico2 on Nov. 24 2004,16:56

make sure the new drive is set to slave or is on a different ide channel

Posted by littlepenguin on Nov. 29 2004,02:13

I had an experience w/ DSL where it would say FATAL ERROR when I tried to use cfdisk. Note: Running from CD. I solved the FATAL ERROR problem by instead of just typing 'cfdisk', I typed 'sudo cfdisk'.

Second, if things get messed up, you could try 'cfdisk -z'. The '-z' option zeroes the partition table. WARNING: This erases your partition table!

Third, about the type 7c type disk partition, just change that from 7c to what ever you need. (eg. 83, Linux partition.)

PS: I read this story where someone's Win XP wouldn't boot, so someone booted KNOPPIX, used cfdisk, and found out the partition was some crazy partition type. So they changed it back to NTFS, and everything worked!

littlepenguin

Posted by I went to bed very late on Dec. 10 2004,12:25

cool, there are some ideas.

first I ll try to boot from the live-cd and try sudo cfdisk again. I have not tried it yet because I have to boot from floppy and I do not have the floppy boot-disk anymore.
One the one hand I am very lazy loading a new floppy from the net while on the other hand I try out some cfdisk parameters for hours.

I think its time for high-speed floppy booting and running cfdisk from the live-cd

What will happen when i delete (or overwrite) the MBR? Will I loose all the data? I do not want to loose all the data.

My last question: What about my data when I delete type 7c (Its my first linux system and I messed the partitions up).
DSL is on /hda (not /hda1

) and there is another /hda1 which does not work. A friend told me this is very odd.
Hda1 is displayed in /mnt. I am able to mount it and there is an dir called /optional (I didnt creste it). It seems to be the 10MB boot partition for old harddrives which my previous (unsuccesful) debian installation supposed to create

I hope I am not too chaotic today.

Greets C

Posted by ghickey on Jan. 06 2005,21:13

I am attempting to reformat a DiskonModule (IDE - CompactFlash) I formarted/copied m0n0wall image on it-using an XP pro machine. Now booting from DSL issuing a cfdisk I get "Fatal Error: Cannot read..." and it is not booting my wall.

The flash is 32M. I have no other HD in the box. I have tried the "-z" switch with the same result. The tried "sudo cfdisk too"

I am very new to linux. Is there another formating program I could use. I am willing to start from scratch....

Note: putting the module in my XP box just causes the machine to loop thru a reboot process. The BIOS "recognizes" it but that is about it. Partition Magic 8.0 Floopy boot does not recognize it.

Posted by I went to bed very late on Jan. 08 2005,13:07

I solved my problem yesterday in a brilliant way:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=32k
and
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=32k.

I like it