fdisk vs cfdisk... And is my drive borked or what?
I'm new to Arch. I recently dumped a very bloated Sabayon installation
which left me enough room on my laptop for two other distros... I went with
PCLinuxOS AND Arch because both sounded like reinstalling from scratch
wasn't a twice a year thing...
Actually I tried installing PCLinuxOS on a usb drive before I dumped Sabayon.
But something went wrong in the first attempt when the installer formatted
the new PCLinuxOS root partition on /dev/sda (as it called my usb drive)
and promptly wrote the partition table to /dev/hdb (as it called my
laptop's internal drive... ARGH! Fortunately after a send attempt succeeded
in installing to usb drive succeeded some tool called "testdisk: was able
to restore my laptop's partition table. And every thing worked again...
(That was the last time I'll ever let an installer format anything.
Strictly pre-partition and pre-mkfs from now on...)
Any way I only mention it because When I got around to installing Arch on
one of the two partitions I recovered from Sabayon, I skipped the
installation step of letting cfdisk touch my partitions and simply selected
the partition I previously prepared for it with mkfs.ext3. But later as
working my way through the beginners guide in the wiki, the clear
explanation of why distro's like to use UUID instead of /dev/Xdx# sold me
on using persistent (BUT HUMAN READABLE!!!) entries like:
"/dev/disk/by-label/Arch_lap-7" & "/dev/disk/by-label/SWP_lap-12"
Especially since there was a wealth of how-to info right there in the
wiki... But in the process I happened to do an:
fdisk /dev/sda
Which complained about a dos compatibility flag and that I should
change the display/entry units to sectors. This showed me a small bit of unused
space above my last logical partition (/dev/sda12)...
Anyway I decided to look at it with cfdisk (which I haven't used in years
but remembered as being easier to work with than fdisk...) But all I got
from cfdisk was.
=> FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends after end-of-disk
=> Press any key to exit cfdisk
Which considering the recent "testdisk" repair, frightened be a bit. But it
also frustrated me. Especially since fdisk didn't show anything like that...
Unless maybe: When "cfdisk /dev/sda" says "partition 3:" is it counting from 0?
That is, does it mean "/dev/sda4" ???
Because that's my extended partition... And a close look at the ending
cylinder/sector of /dev/sda4 is a slightly higher number than it reports
the total cylinders/sectors to be...
I've pasted both the sector and cylinder views of my part table below, Is
this anything I should be worried about??? Is there a way to fix this
without destroying everything in the extended partition??? (That's a LOT of
backing up to dvd, and I don't have room anyplace else...)
fdisk vs cfdisk... And is my drive borked or what?
