On Sat, 16 Nov 2002 19:46:47 -0000 "David Crease" david@creases.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
Hello,
I've been running a dual boot system (Win98 & Linux RedHat) for a couple of years. The system has a single hdd of 30Gb which I partitioned using FIPS when I installed Linux. I created two partitions for the Linux, one small for boot and one other, totalling about 5Gb. The Windows partition has never used more than 7 of the 25ish Gb allocated to it and I thought it would be a good idea to claim more for Linux use. Accordingly I ran FIPS this afternoon and created another 5Gb partition. Everything seems to function well with the original Windows and Linux partitions but when I tried to run cfdisk in Linux to format the new partition I got a fatal error. I tried fdisk and got something similar. They were unable to open hda.
Any chance of posting the error message?
One possibility would simply be permissions on the /dev/hda device file - you are running fdisk and/or cfdisk as root aren't you?
The other possibility would be that the partition table on that hard disk has become corrupt. This is not a disaster as it can probably be reconstructed but that may be rather hard over e-mail.
Related to this, some disks have use geometry translation to cope with various silly limits in the IDE interface and the BIOS and these translation schemes can sometimes cuse problems when one system know about the translations and the other doesn't.
Steve.