Over the last few days I’ve been building a new desktop machine. I was going to hold off another year or so, but, I’m getting paid well for doing timely writing and I didn’t want to find myself suddenly reduced to my laptop. I had replaced a few components in my other machine, but the CPU and motherboard were over 5 years old according to the dates they displayed when booting. I had recently even had to replace the CPU fan due to noise the other one was making, thus, I bit the bullet and ordered enough pieces to assemble an AMD 3Ghz Quad Core desktop in an old Systemax case I had laying around.
This one needed to have a DOS boot partition as well as OpenSuSE because I might get back into doing some Zinc work later this year. I dutifly obtained MS-DOS 7.10 GNU licensed DOS and FreeDOS 1.1. After installing MS-DOS, then FreeDOS, I was horribly upset with FreeDOS. It had way more problems than the previous version AND most of the boot software now displayed MS-DOS 7.1 logos. The same appeared to be true with both the DRDOS enhancement project and NXDOS.
Of course, I made the grand assumption that my FAT-32 DRIVE_D partition would be accessible by either DOS. Ever since I started using OS/2 over a decade ago I had the habit of keeping either a FAT-16 or FAT-32 DRIVE_D partition so I could exchange files with any other OS on my machine. There was a time when I had (and needed) more than three operating systems on the machine due to the work I was doing at the time. The FAT logical drive in an extended partition allowed me to quickly exchange data. This was long before we had thumb drives. You should also know that USB devices and DOS don’t have the magic they do with GUI systems.
Insult was added to injury when I booted MS-DOS 7.1. (FreeDOS once again had issues booting under Grub.) The “extended partition” created by the OpenSuSE installer has a type of 69 which is completely unrecognized by MS-DOS. This lead me to delete the FreeDOS partition and manually move the DRIVE_D logical drive to a physical primary partition. Of course I also decided to expand two other logical drives to utilize the space once consumed by DRIVE_D. I used the Gnome Partition tool on Parted Magic 6.7 CD. I knew I should have just backed things up, deleted, then restored, but, I was getting ready to leave so opted to let this run all night, which is exactly how long it took.
I was the good little soldier. I booted recovery and dumped the information to manually edit fstab.
linux-pus9:/home/roland # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00028bf5
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 40337407 20168672+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 40337408 81981439 20822016 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda3 * 81981440 2930276351 1424147456 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 81983488 86188031 2102272 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 86190080 128135167 20972544 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 1227030528 2695049215 734009344 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 2695051264 2930255871 117602304 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 128137216 1227028479 549445632 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order
I also completely ignored the last line in green. Very carefully I changed all of the FSTAB entries to match this output. When I rebooted my home was gone. It was there under a different “home” location, just not the one the boot pointed to.
Much frustration and head scratching occurred, then I noticed this:
Yast expert partitioner
The output from fdisk has the partitions in the wrong order. My books partition was being mounted as /home, and several other things were hosed. Another careful edit session followed by a reboot made things all better.