Re: sfdisk

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com> writes:

    Jim> I've been having an interesting time with a Quantum Fireball
    Jim> 1.08 SCSI HDD (it's the one daisey chained to the SB16 board -
    Jim> in my Compaq Prolinea;-) It seems my friend who installed it
    Jim> set the number of cylinders to 1042 instead of 1024 (I guess
    Jim> that explains why LILO never worked.) I tried resetting the
    Jim> number of cylinders using cfdisk - but got an error 12 when

He did this in the partition table or in the BIOS or in the SB
firmware?  cfdisk should be able to figure this out.  If it doesn't,
something weird is going on.

    Jim> writing (also got a nasty message about a bad superblock.) He
    Jim> says he used sfdisk - something I tried to check out using
    Jim> Altavista but got only 3 hits - all in Japanese. I'd like to
    Jim> reformat it and set 2 ext2 Linux partitions and a linux swap
    Jim> partition but have had no success at reformatting. Is the
    Jim> original sfdisk getting in my way?

I don't see why; it could be that sfdisk takes more risks than cfdisk
does.  cfdisk was written by Kevin Martin (I think), anyway, it was
one of the BOGUS guys.  BOGUS's PMS is the package manager that
RedHat's RPM is based on.  They are very interested in safety.  If
cfdisk doesn't like your disk, you should be worried.

    Jim> On another note, X_windows is still stuck in 16 colors:-( I'm

Have you tried the Ctrl-Alt-plus or whatever combination it is that
switches video modes?

    Jim> using a Sony Trinitron monitor with a Tseng ET4000/W32: RevB
    Jim> chipset. Superprobe reports the first video is Super-VGA but
    Jim> MSD says I'm using VGA. The video adapter is wired directly
    Jim> to the motherboard. Do I need to install a video card
    Jim> instead? If I do, any recommendations? When I set up the
    Jim> Xconfig file I skipped the clock speed setting - did I goof?

Yes.  The clocks are needed for SVGA modes because of the bank
switching that needs to be done.  "Be vewwy vewwy quwiet; we'we
hunting WABBIT!"  This is tricky stuff.  Note that there are two
clocks you need to worry about, the SVGA board's clocks (modern
XFree86 X servers (3.1+, Ithink) mostly do this automagically but you
may need to fiddle with it).  Or maybe there isn't a Tseng Server?
Yes, there is.  Check to make sure that /usr/X11R6/bin/X is symlinked
to XF86_W32.

The second clock is for the monitor.  If you don't tell the XF86Config
what horizontal and vertical syncs your monitor can handle, it will be 
conservative and assume that only the VGA is safe.  You might want to
post your /etc/XF86Config.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com