[NCLUG] fdisk, large disk, dual boot, WindowsME+redhat

[Wells]

I'd appreciate suggestions about how to salvage a lost disk partition.

I dual boot AMD MicronPC with redhat 7.1 and WindowME.   The dual boot
finally started working after doing complete reinstalls of WindowsME and
Redhat. This machine has a 40GB hard drive.

Findings: The key to allowing partitionless installation was to ensure that
the Linux partition ended within the first 8GB of the disk. fips was unable
to repartition our original WindowsME installation, I expect because it does
not handle large disks.


My problem is with the /hda3 large partition. It was visible under Windows
as D:. I had run scandisk on d:. After a few days (not sure what happened,
some adding new partitions for Linux), WindowsME now sees it as "RAW" File
system and requests it be reformated. cfdisk in linux states "partition 5:
enlarged logical partition overlap". One strange thing about the D: drive
when it was visible under WindowsME was that WIndowsME reported the size as
way too big - hundreds of GBs, but it worked ok for a while.

How can I have confidence the D: partition won't go south again?
sfdisk sees some errors, but not with hda3 - could they be related?

I welcome your suggestions. I'm just about to give up this dual boot.





Now we have the following partitions:

/tmp/hda1  Win95 FAT32 4096543 blocks (boot)
/tmp/hda3  Extended   34684335 blocks
/tmp/hda5  Linux Swap 530113   blocks
/tmp/hda6  Linux      3791277  blocks
/tmp/hda7  Linux      1542208  blocks
 as it shows on fdisk in the Red Hat installation fdisk

In Disk Druid, /hda3 is not visible:

hda1 4000M Win95 FAT32
hda5 512M Linux swap
hda6 3702M Linux Native
hda7 1506M Linux Native

sfdisk -V -l

/dev/hda1 510 cylinders Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 Empty
/dev/hda3  4318 cylinders Extended
/dev/hda4  Empty
/dev/hda5 66 cylinders linux swap
  start (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/hda6  472 cylinders Linux
/dev/hda7 192 cylinders Linux
 start (c,h,s) expected 1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
Warning Partition 5 does not start at a cylinder boundary