On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Alex Snow wrote: > on any 2.6.x system it appears that there is one partition acording to > fdisk (type 55/EZ-Drive). Anyone have any idea why this is happening? Basically, EZ-Drive was one of several products known as dynamic disk overlays. They would allow a machine whose CMOS couldn't handle drives over, say, 8GB, or 32GB to still function. I ran into this when I put a 40GB drive into an old machine that refused to recognize anything larger than 8GB. The drive overlay gets loaded into memory, and basically forces the drive to work despite the CMOS. Because almost nobody has old computers requiring drive overlays, the Linux kernel dropped automatic detection of them in the 2.6 series. Basically, what Linux is doing in the 2.4 kernels is noticing the disk overlay, then skipping over it to find the real partition table. A quick Google search reveals that the syntax of the boot flag is "hda=remap." Obviously, you substitute the correct drive here. This will force a 2.6 kernel to skip over the EZ-Drive partition. I don't know if this works with the newer LibATA drivers, but I doubt it. Since Slackware doesn't use them for IDE drives, this shouldn't present a problem. Anyway, good luck.
