Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 14:49:40 EDT From: Charles Fee <CXF111@psuvm.psu.edu> Subject: really odd disk problem..
Over the weekend, I upgraded my meager 386sx-16 to an AMD 386/40 with 8 megs
of ram, all seemingly went well, until I try to install Lilo..
According to fdisk, my drive is
832 sectors x 6 cylinders x 33 sectors = approx 80 megs
I know for a fact that the drive is 124 megs (Maxtor 7120a)
According to the installation, in order to get the disk to work with dos, it
suggested a user definable drive of:
936 X 16 cyclinders X 17 sectors = 124 megs
All works fine, no matter what happens.. I've compiled 0.97pl6 from this
drive, along with lilo, tin, and minicom (today..) when I try to install
lilo, it appears to work, but rebooting does nothing, and I am forced to
boot off floppy..
but here's where it gets weird:
when booting from floppy, I get 'partition table ok' and it loads the
partitions (hda1=root, 62 or so megs) hda3=/usr, 55 megs, and an 8.5 meg
swap partition (not currently used)
When going into fdisk, under Extra functionality, I change the 832x6x33 back
to 936x16x17 and save the changes.. they are NOT written to disk and
nothing changes.. All the CMOS settings are 936x16x17. This is the only
drive and it has worked fine, except that it is really screwed up according
to linux.. I'd rather not repartition it and lose everything, but if it is
a fix, I will do so..
On a related note, using X11v2.0: since switching motherboards, X no longer
finds its RGB database and everything is black or white, no text is
visible..
I have fsck'd all 3 partitions, and get no errors, but the fdisk listing the
different partition information and lilo's refusal to load suggest something
may be screwed up in the partition table..
needless to say, my apologies for this stream of consciousness style post,
and any and all help will be greatly appreciated..