From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Mon,  9 Apr 2007 05:51:31 +0200
From: John Soros <sorosj@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Message-ID: <20070409055131.18fa0ecc@minitux.homeshield>
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Subject: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the
 plan9 installer
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 412e89b8-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

Hi all!
This is my first message, so please don't bash me too hard for my
ignorance!
I just got a shiny new dell inspiron 640m notebook. It has a core2duo
processor, 2 gigs of RAM and a 120gig hdd. The first thing I did, after
installing linux on it was to try plan9. I was amazed that the
installer actually started up on this brand new system, but eh, plan9
is a modern operating system, I guess ;)
The problem was that dell shipped that laptop with more than 12 gigs
reserved for the windows restore thing and other various stuff on 4
partitions, so I hardly had any primary partitions to use. My first try
was to install plan9 on a secondary partition (yes, rtfm!!!), which was
a very stupid thing to do, nevertheless the partition table got messed
with really bad. I mean, I could hardly recover my linux root partition
from the 6 partitions I had on the disk. The rest got wiped.
Okay, I thought, what a blunder, I wont miss that one again. So I wiped
my disk clean, and repartitioned now without all the dell partitions, so
I had my first partition reserved for plan9. I just got to the point of
installing plan9 on the machine again, so I loaded the plan9 cd in and
booted it (from april 4th 2007). I created the plan9 partition at the
beginning, where I reserved 3 gigs for it when reinstalling my system.
Okay, I thought, I got through the partitioning part with no problem, I
also subdivided my partition and mounted the fossil partition. Then I
thought I would check out what happened, and reboot my system into
linux. I know cfdisk is one of the most sensitive partitioning
tools, so I fired it up, and, to my joy, it spat an error message at
me. Actually, the same one as the one I got before.The error was
partition 4 extends past end of disk. I think partition 4 was my
extended partition, but I did not really see anything strange, I
checked the cylinders, but it looked like partition 4's end was the
last cylinder of the disk, so I didn't really understand, the same
thing happened before, when I installed it on an extended partition:
the partition table lloked fine, but cfdisk would complain, and my
system would get unbootable.
Sorry for the length of the message.
cheers!
John