Moving the install & Linux fdisk 20gb IDE drive h*ll

[BIll Layer <blayer@uswest.net>]

Hey all,

Due to a variety fo issues I encountered (most of which i probably made
myslef), I elected to use the following method to move the install:

cp -Rpdv [dir] /mnt/hdb2

subbing in the name of each dir in the / dir, one at a time. This seems to have
worked just fine. Clumsy, but at least it got this newbie though. Live and learn
(hopefully).

New issue: Using linux fdisk on the new 20gb drive was a nightmare. At first,
fdisk would not see the correct drive size; cylynders were seens as 16,383 - I
had to manually plug in a cylinder value of 39,703 for the full 20gb to be
recognized. 39,703 is the value returned by the BIOS autodection, when the
drive is set to "Normal" mode. I hope this was the correct choice.

The real problem came when I was partitioning the drive: I was able to create
up to 4 primary partitions, or 3 primary partitons and 1 (empty) extended
partition. But when I tried to create logical drives in the exteneded
partition, fdisk bombed with "cannot write to /dev/hdc" fatal error, when I
used the 'w' (write & quit) command. To my dismay, fdisk was no longer able to
work with the drive at all (!), returning an error of "cannot read from
/dev/hdc" when I would try to invoke fdisk.on /dev/hdc 

I was able to boot to a DOS floppy, run DELPART and the drive became readable
again. I went through the above process half a dozen times, trying all manner
of differet combinations of primary, extneded and logical drives. Every time I
created a logical drive that used the full extended partiton, I got the same
set of errors.

I settled for four primary partitons, one swap, the other three linux native of
about 6.4 gb each. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this trouble.. 

thanks again,
Bill