Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
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)...
It shows those two warnings with the default call. AFAIK it is unrelated
to your
actual partition contents.
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...
Could 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...)
Caveat emptor: you should have a backup before touching partitions :)
That said, you only want to "truncate" the partitions, and since your last
partition is the swap, that should be pretty safe. The process of unmounting
swap partition, delete partition with fdisk, create with fdisk,
reformat swap
/shouldn't/ affect your data.
I find an oddity on your paritition table, though. You say that
/dev/sda4 is an
extended partition (and you do have logical partitions) but it is listed
by fdisk as
having type 0xf (W95 Ext'd (LBA)) instead of 0x5 (Extended). I suspect
that after
testdisk restoring, some old entries got loaded?
If that's really a wrong entry, you can do the fdisk delete/recreate tip
to force its
length to be inside the disk limits. However, fdisk won't allow you to
set a partition
type of 5, which is a pity when you *really* know what you are doing.
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