[Wylug-help] strange hard drive problem

[John Hodrien]

david powell wrote:

> the error it comes up with is pad partition table , unable to install once 
> that is fixed it installs but fails to boot once installed 
> 
> the bios  lba modes etc are all ok and what they should be

I'd been ignoring this thread up to now, as it just seemed like weirdness (and 
windows related at that).  But this sounds oddly familiar.  I would check the 
C/H/S mapping.  Windows (all the way up to XP) does a very good pretence of 
using LBA for everything, but during boot it does in fact go and use CHS (which 
is also why it still has some large disk issues).  Back in the early days of 
2.6, there were bugs that meant that your CHS mappings got changed (I think so 
that it was remapped with 64 heads).  The following fixes it back to what I 
think is the normal default:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda

jh