Fix for the XP dual boot problem

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Wed, 19 May 2004 09:29:57 -0700 (PDT)
Radu Cornea <ccradu at yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > /me assumes it would be possible to automate the fix up of the
> > partition table with creative use of:
> > 
> >   sfdisk -d | sfdisk -C# -H# -S#
> > 
> You are right, that is a way better solution. I wasn't aware of the
> sfdisk utility before.
> 
> I tried to recreate the bad partition problem again (from the saved mbr
> sector), made sure XP wasn't booting any more and then I run in Linux:
> 
> sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H240 /dev/hda
> 
> This seems to have fixed it just like my original procedure (well much
> easier :) ). I even did a byte compare of the mbr with the one I restored
> before using those long steps and they are the same.
> 
> Plus, I did not have to run 'fdisk /mbr' from DOS any more (I guess the
> sfdisk utility just changes the values not the rest of signatures etc).
> So this looke like the best solution to fix the problem so far.
> 
> If this helps to find the problem with the wrong geometry, even after
> fixing the mbr, the kernel reports wrong geometry in
> /proc/ide/hda/geometry. My laptop is a IBM Thinkpad 600, so it probably
> has an older BIOS. If there is anything else I can do to help finding the
> bug, please let me know.
> 
> Radu
> 

Glad to hear that works too.   So it's very easy for someone to fix if
they happen to have this problem.   So it's really no big deal.   This was
what my little script did too except it used the -N option of sfdisk to
restrict the change to just the Windows partition as it's only Windows
that seems to care.   

It would be nice if the installer always protected the values of partitions
it doesn't create.

Cheers,
Sean.