Topic: [Resolved] Stuck with the wrong HDD geometry
Hi there.
In the process of cloning an old 80gb drive onto a new 320gb drive, I've apparently managed to convince the OS that my new HDD is also of size 80gb. Here are the details:
* I normally run Windows, so I booted into Linux via Slax on a USB drive.
* I used dd to copy my old drive onto my new drive.
* I opened GParted, which displayed, as expected, that my new drive contained a small service partition (FAT16, I think) followed by a large data partition (NTFS) followed by a large amount of free space.
* I told GParted to resize the NTFS partition from ~80gb to take up all the free space on the drive. This operation completed successfully.
* When I try to boot into Windows off the new drive, I get a stop error. Back in Linux, when I run fdisk on the new drive or examine it in GParted, the 320gb drive now shows up as an unformatted 80gb drive.
(I used dd instead of GParted to do the actual copying because GParted wouldn't copy the service partition on my old drive. I'm not sure if that service partition is necessary -- I've heard that some Lenovo laptops won't boot without it, but I've never heard that about Dell laptops -- but I figured I might as well try to copy it. In any case, this procedure worked just fine on a friend's Lenovo laptop, with a very similar setup.)
It looks like resizing the NTFS partition somehow messed up the operating system's idea of the new hard drive's geometry. To wit, fdisk reports 9546 cylinders, but I expect 16383. Changing the number of cylinders with fdisk doesn't seem to do anything. (If the geometry really is the problem, then more than just the cylinder count is wrong; the drive is 1/4 its expected size, but it's missing fewer than half its cylinders.)
I'm perfectly happy to start from scratch with this drive, ignore the service partition, and use GParted to perform the cloning this time. But first, I need to convince the operating system that the drive is actually 320gb in size, and I'm not sure how to do that. I've already tried copying over the new drive (well, the first 80gb of it, anyway) with /dev/zero, but that didn't change anything; at this point, I'm out of ideas.
Do you guys have any idea what's going on here? I'd really appreciate whatever insight you have.
Thanks,
-Justin