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Topic: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

Let me say that gparted is great.  I spent so long trying to find something to resize partitions on our Compaq proliant ML330 server, and nothing (like partition magic or disk director) would work with win2k server.  Even the Knoppix live CD did not work - qtparted got an error when mounting the drive and fdisk saw all the partitions as unknown types with ? as the boot flag.

I guess compaq set the system up in an odd way with a 40mb FAT partition, followed by a 3gb NTFS boot partition, a 9gb data partition, a 3gb "extra server" partition, and 3gb of unpartitioned space.
gparted worked great and showed all these things correctly.  I first resized the third partition (3gb) into the unpartitioned space after it, making it 5.91gb.  However, every time I run chkdsk on boot, it gets the error "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable".  This is on the THIRD partition, non-bootable, so I wonder why it even has a boot sector?  Maybe this is this a bug with gparted assigning a boot sector to a non-boot partition?  Other than that error, which I've had come up with 4 chkdsks (so it isn't being repaired), the partition seems to be fine.

I'm using the latest LiveCD downloaded two days ago, btw.

I then deleted the 9gb data partition (our data is on a mirrored SATA array now) and used gparted to resize the 3gb boot partition into the 9gb space, making it 12.7gb.  chkdsk reports no problems on this partition and windows works fine.

Any ideas?  Either way, thanks for the great work!

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Re: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

Hi KaniS,
I think this might be a bug. Could you please post a screen shot of the GParted layout ?
I gonna contact the main dev, since he should have some idea about the problem.
I remember we set bootsector update for ntfs move, but i think only bootable partition are concerned.

Anyway hexedit is on the livecd, so we can play with it too :-p

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

So you just want me to take a screen shot of the graphical user interface that shows the rectangles representing the partitions when gparted loads up?

I can only boot into gparted on the server early in the morning before anyone else comes in to work, although even then I sometimes interrupt someone working from home, so I'd like to do as much diagnostic stuff as possible all at once.  Anything else I should do?

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Re: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

KaniS wrote:

So you just want me to take a screen shot of the graphical user interface that shows the rectangles representing the partitions when gparted loads up?

Yes, please.

KaniS wrote:

Anything else I should do?

Probalby yes :
-1- output of

# fdisk -ul

-2- If you think you can, http://www.dominok.net/en/it/en.it.clon … l#modboots
Output of what is asked in this link :-/

I think it will do the trick. Hope so.
thx

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

Well, I got the screenshot, which it put in /root/gparted.jpeg, but I assume that's a ramdisk or something cause I don't find that file on either drive after I return to win2k.  I tried typing "mount /dev/hdb2" and it says it isn't found in /etc/fstab or something.  I don't see a web browser, 'lynx' and 'ftp' both say unknown command, so I have no idea how to get the screenshot out of there and post it here.  There is a floppy drive, but I don't have any working floppies around.

I manually copied what I assume is the important part of the fdisk -ul output (hopefully there are no typos):

Disk /dev/hdb: 20.0 GB, 20020396032 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2434 cylinders, total 39102336 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start             End        Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1               63          80324        40131   12   Compaq diagnostics
/dev/hdb2  *      80325     26716094   13317885   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdb3     26716095     39102209  6193057+   7  HPFS/NTFS

I'm not sure what you mean by the output of http://www.dominok.net/en/it/en.it.clon

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Re: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

Of course the screenshot is gone away when rebooting : you need to first mount any partition somewhere and then copy/move the jpg to it. Or mount usb stick or something to backup jpg to it.

I should be away newt hours/days, but i will try to answer you asap.

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwritable" on non-boot partition

Unix isn't my native OS so I had to figure out that you must create a directory to mount the hard drive into for it to work.  Unfortunately, it would not mount my ntfs partition as read/write, only read, so I still couldn't save the screenshot there.  Didn't you know that would happen?

After some web searching I did figure out how to mount a digital camera as a USB mass storage device, so I saved the screenshot and eventually put it here:
http://www.chrisdragon.com/downloads/gparted.jpeg

Here is the copied/pasted fdisk -ul output (vi added some extra tabs for some reason):
Disk /dev/hdb: 20.0 GB, 20020396032 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2434 cylinders, total 39102336 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hdb1              63       80324       40131   12  Compaq diagnostics
   /dev/hdb2   *       80325    26716094    13317885    7  HPFS/NTFS
   /dev/hdb3        26716095    39102209     6193057+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sda: 37.0 GB, 37019566080 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4500 cylinders, total 72303840 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/sda1              63    72260369    36130153+  42  SFS

   Disk /dev/sdb: 37.0 GB, 37019566080 bytes
   255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4500 cylinders, total 72303840 sectors
   Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
      /dev/sdb1              63    72260369    36130153+  42  SFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 16 MB, 16777216 bytes
4 heads, 32 sectors/track, 256 cylinders, total 32768 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/sdc1   *          41       31679       15819+   1  FAT12
   Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
        phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 1, 10)
    Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
         phys=(247, 3, 32) logical=(247, 1, 32)

I also looked more at the http://www.dominok.net/en/it/en.it.clon thing and converted the start sector of hdb3 (26716095) into hex and rearranged the byte order (0x197a7bf -> 0xbfa79701) but "hexedit /dev/hdb3" said unknown command.