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Re: fdisk problems




I have encountered the '0 flag' fdisk problem as a difference between 
Caldera fdisk and Slackware fdisk. Slackware has it and Caldera not. It 
is a bug in fdisk that mistakes the extended partition marker for 
something else or such. It does nothing more. Ignore it.

fdisk gets very confused if you use it to partition a disk that was set 
up by windoze or dos 6.22 initially as the windoze and dos installs 
switch the disk into the highest possible head number. If you have such a 
problem then you usually need to back up the whole disk and then delete 
the partition table and recreate it by hand using fdisk from scratch.  

Linux reads both the partition table entries and tries to identify the 
real geometry of the disk. It gets very confused if the number of heads 
in the Linux partition and in the lower dos/windoze partitions is 
different. The purpose of the exercise above is to make the number of 
heads the same for doze and linux (and in fact for all the partitions on 
the same disk).

In my experience, using LBA instead of CHS brings a 10-20% speed penalty 
when accessing a large number of small files on linux. I have no 
experience with the newest boards and disks but it used to be so.


Peter Lorand Peres
------------------
plp@actcom.co.il 100310.2360 on CIS (please use Internet address for mail)
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/plp

" The creed of Inland Revenue is simple: 'If we can bring one little smile
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	- David Frost 

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