Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I was able to format one of the scsi drives (pqmagic) and expect the 
others to work.

I decided to stop using my 3.2G linux drive with 'bad partition table 
signature' even though it had three linux partitions and worked fine 
(apart from needing to disable UDMA in CMOS to eliminate a long wait at 
boot with a timeout trying to use DMA).

A friend gave me two Maxtor 6GB drives, each with one FAT32 Win95 
partition.

Using BL3 (from loop) cfdisk, I deleted the partition on the first one, 
made four New linux partitions (all primary) and tried to do a Write and 
was informed that I could not write to the partition table.  Nor could I 
reboot, had to power off.  PQMagic crashed.  cfdisk -z after power on gave 
me the Fatal Error bad partition table signature, and again I was unable 
to write to it.  I suspect this drive is bad, since the other matching 6GB 
worked perfectly.

So, the Fatal Error bad partition table signature can mean:
1)  The disk has no partitions but can be partitioned (with cfdisk -z, or 
PQMagic, etc.).

2)  The disk had a partition but when you delete it you cannot write any 
more partitions (with cfdisk -z or PQMagic) and the disk is now apparently 
unusable. Is this a hardware failure of the part of the disk containing 
the partition table?  Is there some way around this problem?

3)  The disk is usable in linux if you write the partitions with something 
other than cfdisk (which does not even work with cfdisk -z), and maybe 
this is related to the DMA problem.

I have only run across one each of 2) and 3).

I also have two 2-3GB disks from which I can no longer boot into DOS, but 
they work fine for linux as slave drive, booting with loadlin.  They have 
bad boot sectors.  Can lilo be used with them as master (without DOS)?


On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> > Is there some linux tool for BLs that will work with never-partitioned
> > drives with no file system on them yet, and with my IDE drive that was
> > partitioned already, and formatted, and working with linux?

cfdisk -z works on most of the disks that did not have a partition to 
start with, but not in case 2) (unusable?) or 3) (usable).