Text 6916, 78 rader
Skriven 2006-08-08 22:29:50 av Maurice Kinal (1:140/13.1)
   Kommentar till text 6914 av WAYNE CHIRNSIDE (1:123/140)
Ärende: llf
===========
Hey WAYNE!

Aug 08 16:25 06, WAYNE CHIRNSIDE wrote to MAURICE KINAL:

 WC> I googled the "Nr AF" fdisk (x)pert mode reveals when you (p)rint
 WC> to screen and found ( and saved) a page describing how someone
 WC> recovered from something that appears similar.
 WC> He had the exact same numerical string in the disk "ID"
 WC> And he got it by having removed a non-contiguous extended partition.
 WC> I never created any such partition but something did.

That sounds like an artifact from a previous owner.  Something isn't totally
cleared from back then.

 WC> Still trying to wrap my head around this.

Me too but on the plus side I checked out a 64M compactflash disk I thought
might be on it's way out and I threw a combination of read/write procedures at
it (dd was in the mix) and it checked out fine.  I then created a single
partition (type 83) and double checked with mke2fs and it was also happy with
the arrangement doing a four read/write cycle to all the allocated blocks with
four different patterns.  Looking good.  Now I will try an extra special
ttylinux and see if it'll boot up but I still need to build the next extra
special ttylinux (pure 64-bit) but I am confident it will work on it's intended
target.

 WC> I really don't think it is hardware.
 WC> I _think_ it's malware exploit of how Linux operates.

Possibly but given you keep on putting a DOS partition on there who would know
for sure it isn't that creating the problem.  Maybe something hidden in the mbr
just itching for a DOS partition to 'play' with.

 WC> on a boot to the CD ( no mounted hard drive) running tune2fs -r 
 WC> claims to recover 62 unallocated sectors.

That is normal.

 WC> Then upon reboot nothing has changed at all and the partition table
 WC> remains the same.

Correct.  Unless you altered it then it should be the same.

 WC> Everything behaves itself.
 WC> I'm no longer being hijacked to the "Spykiller" web page
 WC> when I hit home in Mozilla or Konqueror ( set to www.google.com)

Sounds good.

 WC> Yet I still see that 62 sectors at the beginning of the drive

Normal.

 WC> and /dev/hda1 starting at sector 63 and a remaining empty untyped
 WC> and appearently undeletable partition 4.

I've seen that before.  If I recall correctly it was written by a certain
bootloader for it's own usage which is required.  I think maybe OS/2's
bootloader also did that or something simular.  Also I seem to recall using
fdisk's expert mode to get rid of it somehow and then fdisking the drive the
regular way, formatting it/them, and using lilo to take care of booting.  All
was 100% after all that and there were no oddball partitions, including
whatever hidden bootloader ones.  Seems to me that also freaked out the bios's
virus detection which I then turned off seeing I knew the 'virus' in that
particular case.  Since then (years and years ago) that drive packed it in from
other unrelated physical problems.  The problem with some older stuff,
especially bios's, is that they are really married to some later proven bad
idea which started out as 'it sounded like a good idea at the time' type idea. 
;-)

I am still not convinced it might be one of those but you should be able to
tell better from your angle.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.2.0
 * Origin: The Pointy Stick Society XXII - A two bit outfit (1:140/13.1)