Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!emory!cs.utk.edu!cs!gilbert
From: gilbert@cs.utk.edu (Steve Gilbert)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: The problem with 256 heads solved
Date: 22 Sep 1994 13:28:30 GMT
Organization: CS Labs, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Lines: 45
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <GILBERT.94Sep22092830@hydra1a.cs.utk.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hydra1a.cs.utk.edu
Okay, I did the thing with fdisk and it works great.
Here's what I did,
First, If you do a "fdisk wd1" (It may be wd1d, I don't
remember what it wanted), it will list out the partition table
for you. This is something totally different from BSD's idea
of a partition, mind you. The last partition (#3) should be BSD.
All of those figures are correct except for the "ending head" field
which is set to 255 (thus, 256 heads).
1. BACK UP EVERYTHING!
2. fdisk -u wd1
...this will prompt you for the stuff you want to change.
Remember, everything is correct execpt for the ending
head. Accept all the default values it gives you at first.
You'll have to tell it that you want to explicitly define
the beginning and ending values.
3. My 420 MB Conner drive has 16 heads, so I just enter 15 as
the ending head number.
4. When you are back out of fdisk, you can do another fdisk wd1
to make sure the values are correct. Don't worry if you mess up,
you can always change it again. Anything you didn't back up is
probably gone by now anyway :-)
5. Reboot and watch NO error message pop up!
...remember that all you want to do is fdisk the drive. You do NOT
want to run disklabel again or newfs the partitions again. This will
write the incorrect 256 crap back. I did this three times before
I finally got smart and did it right.
I still really don't understand why this happens. This is
a case of right action before right knowledge on my part. If
anyone can enlighten me on the why of some of this, please do.
Hope this helps.
--
Steve Gilbert Internet: gilbert@cs.utk.edu
Backups, Department of Computer Science
University of Tennessee, Knoxville