rd@tarpit.uucp (Bob Thrush) (08/12/89)
I am having a problem using fdisk with a Miniscribe 3085 (7 heads, 1170 cylinders). fdisk barks about an invalid partition table every time I try to make the (1) 1170 cylinder partition active. It then proceeds to clear the partition table. If I only create a partition of 1023 cylinders all is well except I can't use the last ~8.8 Mb of the disk. If I then create a 2nd partition for this last part of the drive, fdisk barks again and clears the table. Apparently, one cannot use fdisk to partition a drive with more than 1023 cylinders. Has anybody else seen this problem or know a solution? Comments? (I know the original AT disk controller had this 10 bit cylinder limitation but the controller I'm using does not.) The test configuration uses a drive type of 12 (7 heads, 855 cyls) which I alter to the correct geometry within fdisk. Since /dev/rdsk/0s10 spans the range of drive 0, I have tried "dd if=/dev/rdsk/0s10 of=/dev/null bs=17b" and it returns 8183 blocks which is expected, ie. 7*1169. It appears that the device driver can access the entire drive. Is there a known fix or work around to fully utilize this geometry? Thanks -- Bob Thrush DOMAIN: rd@aii.com UUCP: uunet!tarpit!rd Automation Intelligence, 1200 W. Colonial Drive, Orlando, Florida 32804