Dangerous file system / disk problem

[Ben Paley]

On Monday 07 June 2004 11:17, Dan Strick wrote:

>
> Partition 2 (sysid 14, start 156296385) is bogus.  I don't have a clue as
> to how it might have been created. 

I *guess* it was the W98 installer - if you boot into DOS and invoke setup.exe 
it's fairly polite, but if you boot from the cdrom, which is what I did, it 
starts to "prepare your hard disk" without asking... aagh! I'm pretty sure 
this is when things began to go wrong.

> If the beginning/end c/h/s addresses 
> are to be believed, it overlaps partition 1.  I would not dare to format
> it.  Instead, I would use the "fdisk -u ad1" command to delete it and
> hope that it never comes back.  If you do this, it would be a good idea
> to back up your FreeBSD system first, especially since you are probably
> not very familiar with the "fdisk -u" command and might possibly make a
> fatal mistake.

This is very scary, but thanks for the advice. I had some more advice (not 
sure if it went to the list or not) to try setting the second partition as 
unused (sysid=0), so I might try that first to see whether I can avoid 
risking destroying everything and making my family hate me.

Thanks ever so much for your advice, I'll let you know what happens, as soon 
as I have enough time to give this the attention it requires.

Thanks a lot,
Ben