OlddogNewtricks wrote
I created 5 temporary ext2 partitions with gparted & as you can see they are all seen. although pmount hasn't put them in order. No problems with gparted either.
Hi and thanks for helping by doing this test.
I noted that you only have one disk and so all your partitions were on hda.
Mine were on hdb.
So I sacrificed my Windows Seven RC1 partition just now on my hda disk and made partitions up to hda12.
Just as you reported they all show in MUT and Pmount so I conclude this is something to do with the second disk.
So I tried to resize and reformat hdb11 using Gaprted on 214X4 but it wouldn't do that. I used Gparted on Ubuntu 9.04 and that worked so I ended up with a newly formatted hdb11 and an hdb12 partitions. Again 214X4 MUT wouldn't see hdb10, 11 or 12.
Next I tried reformatting hdb10,11 and 12 using ttuuxxx's 420 v2 Deeper Thought just in case there was an inode problem with Ubuntu. Deeper Thought was happy to reformat hdb11 and 12. But again 214X4 failed to see hdb10,11 or 12.
214X4 seemed happy to reformat any partition on disk hda but not after hdb9 on disk hdb. The disk hda is 76GiB. Adding all the space up to hdb9 I get 128GiB and to hdb10 I get 148 GiB.
Therefore I believe this is a fundamental problem that affects 214X (and probably other 2 series??) with disks above the magic 137GB (48bit LBA) limit. I guess that would be an fdisk issue?
I then added "pfix=debug" to the grub stanza for 214X4 and saw that it reported
mounting /dev/hdb9 on /mnt/hdb9 failed
and the same for hdb10,11 and 12.
I guess hdb9 just squeezes in as its boot files will be within the 137GB limit so it can boot okay. But Gparted shows superblock errors for hdb10, 11 and 12. As I would now expect.
Puppy 4 series doesn't have this limitation nor does any other linux distro I have so it's definitely not a problem with my BIOS or MOBO.
Puppy 4 series uses gparted 0.3.3 but 214X seems to say it also uses 0.3.3 which is strange as they clearly work differently. For example in 4 series you have to select whether to view hda or hdb at the start of Gparted but in 214X you can toggle between disks using the tab at the top right side.
Anyway I believe GParted is associated with fdisk (??) so I looked at fdisk.
In Deeper Thought doing in terminal
and then
for print partition table I get the full 12 partitions of sdb printed out.
Doing this in 214X works okay for /dev/hda but not for /dev/hdb. No table is printed.
Sorry for very long post but I hope this will convince folk that there is an issue here and what it is associated with. So, is it possible to "update" fdisk (or would it be libparted??) so it can recognise over the 137 GB barrier?
I may as well go on.
Minor niggles include:
1. As OlddogNewtricks noted the partition icons on the desktop are not contiguous. ie they go
hda1, hda10, hda11,hda12,hda2.hda3......
same for hdb not surprisingly.
2. What is a surprise is that it gives an icon for hda4 (even though this is the extended partition) but doesn't do it for hdb4. Very weird.
3. Also Pmount order goes
hda10,hda11,hda12,hda1,hda2......
Again sorry for the long and boring post.
But hope it helps
Dave