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Subject : LUG: Partition Alignment Problem

From : mohamed_s@ncsu.[redacted]

Date : Thu, 23 Dec 2004 14:16:21 -0500


Hey,
I was cleaning up my pc during the break. First I updated my Bios (Dell 4550 P4 2.4Ghz, 384 MB, FX5700 256MB) and then I erased a partition and did a clean install of WinXP (Disk 1). After that I upgraded Fedora 1 to Fedora 2 (Disk 2) by deleting the previously installed partition during install. But then it complained as follows:
\"Unable to align partition properly. This probably mean that another partitioning tool generated incorrect partition table, because it didn\'t have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders.\"

I did the install and I was able to log into both windows and linux, but my partition magic started complaining that LBA and CHS values are not the same and offered to fix it. After that it listed the Disk 2 as bad and adviced me to move the data and format it. I backed up my data and formatted both the hard disk. I switched Disk 2 (120Gb) as Master and Disk 1 (30Gb) as Slave. I formatted using Maxtor\'s utility cos both of them are maxtor disks.

Then I installed 2 boots of WinXP and then when I tried to install FC2, again it gives the same complaint after I select the monitor. I am not sure whether the BIOS update has screwed up everything. If did not ignore this error and proceed further, it gives the following error
\"The partition table on /dev/hbd is inconsistent. There are many reasons why this might be the case. Often, the reason is that Linux detected th BIOS gemoetry incorrectly. However, this does not appear to be the case here. It is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders, and may cause problems with FAT file systems. Using LBA is recommended.\"

I saw in some forum that changing from CHS to LBA might solve this but my BIOS does not have any option. Looks like it does not support it.

I used maxtor utility to check it there is any bad sectors in the hard disk and there isn\'t any. Now is this something that fixable and should I have to revert back to old BIOS incase that is the culprit.

I really wanted to switch to FC2 after having used FC1 for a year but still have to put up with darn XP because of some compatibility issues.

Please help!

Mohamed.

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