[Wylug-help] Disk Images and Partitions

[Towle, William]

> I recently created a Debian Live image file, and copied it to a usb
> stick using dd ... creating one active primary partition on the stick.
[...]
> Unfortunately, I can't check/fix any errors on the new partition, or
> resize it with parted and friends.
> 
> fsck.msdos reports:
> 
>   Seek to 421494272:Invalid argument
> 
> N.B. The number is the place where the partition table says that
> partition is supposed to end. I don't think that there should be no
> other hidden, or partially deleted partitions, on the stick, since I
> prepared it by dd'ing (if=/dev/zero) over the entire device.
> 
> Any ideas about either the cause or solutions?

  Complete speculation, but according to a newsbyte on the FreeDOS web
site today, mkdosfs does something screwy with the heads, sectors, and
offset fields [http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=710403,
zero points for useful clarity].
  The upshot is basically that if there are two places this data should
exist on the disk (partition table and first sector of the partition -
I think that's true of MSDOS' fs) and they disagree, you might
reasonably expect to see the outcome above.

Wills.