[NTLUG:Discuss] Win95 Ext'd (LBA) on my Linux box - where'd that come from

[Jay Urish]

At 12:32 PM 3/13/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>Short history:
>box has 2 60GB drives in it
>It was a RH 7.1, and the person who set it up had partitioned part of hda 
>for /, part for /swap, and then "globed together" the rest of hda and all 
>of hdb to make one big partition, using some form of RAID, and mounted it 
>as /dev/md0
>
>Well that broke, and since then it has become a RH 7.3 box with no "cross 
>volume" partitions or RAID - but it looks like I might have a legacy problem:
>"fdisk -l" returns a display (see below) that indicates the "extended" 
>partition is Win95 LBA.  I just went through a 2 day fsck on the /home 
>partition (hda5) and I think (can't prove it) that the original problem 
>that broke the RAID could have been on hda as well.  By the way, the RH 
>7.3 install was a total "clean install", so I would have assume no legacy 
>problems, but I have never heard of a Win95 partition on a Linux box 
>without it being purposely installed.  [By the way, "fdisk -l" on another 
>of my RH 7.3 machines (also with extended partition) did not reveal any 
>hints of the MS world]
>
>So, can anyone shed some light on what is going on here, and if I am 
>facing a "future of problems" with this Win95 Ext'd partition.
>Thanks in advan


If I were in your shoes, I would back up all important data and wipe the 
drives and re-partition. All this software IDE raid stuff is horse pookey.
If you want a RAID, you get some scsi disks and a raid controller. I have 
had to try and fix several of these rigged up raids and it is a nightmare 
from hell.





Jay Urish       W5GM            Jack of all Trades. Ace of None.
The wandering UNIXWOLF
http://www.unixwolf.net         AIM:jayurish