Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] cfdisk finds Bad signature on partition table

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] cfdisk finds Bad signature on partition table
  • Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 01:25:19 +0000 (UTC)

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, David Moberg wrote:

On 12/9/05, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
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)?

Have you tried 'fdisk /mbr' in DOS? It will reinstall the master boot record,
which includes the DOS bootloader. I think I read somewhere that
cfdisk, even with the -z option, absolutely cannot create a partition table
if you do not already have a good one. You need to use Linux or DOS
fdisk (not cfdisk) or another partitioning tool.

David

Today someone explained that each partition has a boot record, and if the one near the beginning of the disk (after partition table area) goes bad, you can boot from a second partition. Unless your BIOS lets you boot from C D E F (SCSI, zip100, etc.), make a very small first partition and do not format it, and format the second partition as C. So the 2GB DOS drive can be reused for DOS, but now I have linux, I shrank DOS to under 500MB including lots of photos and midi files.

I brought him my 6G drive that would not let me write the partition table with linux cfdisk or PQMagic.

He confirmed the problem in DOS with fdisk, moved the jumper from slave to master, and it worked in DOS and linux. I moved it back to slave and it still worked in linux. It now contained the four partitions I had made, but not formatted. I could see Windows files on the first one. I ran mke2fs and will use the drive now. Perhaps the pins for 'master' were corroded?




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page