Fix for the XP dual boot problem

shmuel siegel fedora at shmuelhome.mine.nu
Wed May 19 17:39:51 UTC 2004


On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 19:29, Radu Cornea wrote:
> I tried to recreate the bad partition problem again (from the saved mbr
> sector), made sure XP wasn't booting any more and then I run in Linux:
> 
> sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H240 /dev/hda
> 
> This seems to have fixed it just like my original procedure (well much
> easier :) ). I even did a byte compare of the mbr with the one I restored
> before using those long steps and they are the same.

I am curious if the following problem is what is meant to be fixed by
this method. Is it considered safe. I tend to feel that since I can
currently use both win2k and linux, and they can read each others
partitions, I should leave everything alone. Especially, since I don't
have the ability to backup 40g of data. Am I fooling myself and should
really try to make the disks consistent?

sfdisk -l /dev/hdb gives
Disk /dev/hdb: 158816 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
Units = cylinders of 516096 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
 
   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *      0+  40640-  40641-  20482843+   7  HPFS/NTFS
                end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,15,63) found (1023,254,63)
/dev/hdb2      40640+  81281-  40641-  20482875   83  Linux
/dev/hdb3      81281+  97840-  16560-   8345767+   7  HPFS/NTFS
                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,15,63) found (1023,0,1)
/dev/hdb4      97840+ 158801-  60961-  30724312+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,15,63) found (1023,0,1)
/dev/hdb5      97840+ 158801-  60961-  30724281    b  W95 FAT32
                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,15,63) found (1023,1,1)

running sfdisk -d /dev/hdb gives
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
# partition table of /dev/hdb
unit: sectors
 
/dev/hdb1 : start=       63, size= 40965687, Id= 7, bootable
/dev/hdb2 : start= 40965750, size= 40965750, Id=83
/dev/hdb3 : start= 81931500, size= 16691535, Id= 7
/dev/hdb4 : start= 98623035, size= 61448625, Id= f
/dev/hdb5 : start= 98623098, size= 61448562, Id= b






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