Partitioning problem with windows vs. linux

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 17:47 -0500, Shawn Iverson wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 31, 2005 3:45 PM, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> >
> >So somehow w2k is getting seriously confused on my system ... 
> >turning on /bootlog and /sos in w2k boot.ini and removing 
> >/fastdetect was not illuminating. I took dd snapshots at each 
> >step with Knoppix. Does anyone know of a good hexeditor that I 
> >could view them in or ideally compare two binary files? My 
> >next step is to experiment with hidden partition types. If 
> >that works I will file an RFE against anaconda to write more 
> >failsafe grub rules by hiding the linux partitions. 
> >Preliminary experiments would indicate that changing the 
> >partition to a hidden type doesn't help. I am not sure if that 
> >is all the "hide" command does in grub.
> >
> 
> Are you using LVM?  W2k might mistake it for a Windows volume due to the
> partition filesystem type.  W2k could be performing a sanity check and
> whacking out at the presence of the foreign partition.  Try partitioning
> the second one type ext3 or Reiser to see if that helps.

I am not formating the partition in any way. I am just adding a new
empty one using fdisk and no matter what "partition type" I choose, w2k
hates it ... even if I choose type 07 which is NTFS. When I first
encountered the problem while installing Fedora, I had manually made
several partitions and had them formatted ext3. Fedora would boot and
run fine but then w2k would not. I have stripped away little by little
to see where the problem is located and it appears that it is having
issues when just an empty partition is added. This is really unusual
since w2k shouldn't care how the rest of the drive is partitioned so
long as it was the first partition.

Displaying the output of sfdisk -d /dev/sda
This is the partition table that is fine:
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=       63, size=292977342, Id= 7, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
/dev/sda3 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
/dev/sda4 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0

This is the partition table that barfs:
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=       63, size=292977342, Id= 7, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=292977405, size=195302205, Id=83
/dev/sda3 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
/dev/sda4 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0


Just for the morbidly curious, this is the partition table after FIXBOOT
has its way with it:
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=218129509, size=1701990410, Id=72
/dev/sda2 : start=729050177, size=543974724, Id=74
/dev/sda3 : start=168653938, size=        0, Id=65
/dev/sda4 : start=2692939776, size=    51635, Id= 0

I know about the problem with the installer messing with the CHS
geometry and w2k not liking that but I believe that I have ruled that
out since the stated geometry as displayed by fdisk -l /dev/sda stays
the same all the time.

I thought that big disk problems were a thing of the past. Am I wrong
about that? I did notice that the w2k installer can't handle
partitioning this drive since the max partition size that I could
specify was 99.999 GB so I actually installed w2k into a partition pre-
made by linux fdisk in the first place.

I am baffled by the behaviour of this machine :[

/Mike