Re: pdisk weirdness

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 10:13:10PM +0100, Martin Costabel wrote:

Having observed for a while that pdisk (linux) doesn't work on my iBook,
I tried to understand what is going on. It's weird.

pdisk sucks, deal with it.  

Doesn't work means that 'pdisk /dev/hda' (or 'pdisk -l' likewise) gives
me the output:

pdisk: Can't read block 0 from '/dev/hda'
Edit /dev/hda -
Command (? for help): p
No partition map exists
Command (? for help): q
Segmentation fault

see above.  you can probably create a new partition table with the `i'
command, though i have seen this has a tendency to create wildly bogus
partition tables (tables wtih the size of the disk being 500GB or some
such bollocks)

This is pdisk version 0.8a2 (16 May 2000) from the pdisk-0.8-1.ppc.rpm
as it is contained in LinuxPPC 2000 and LinuxPPC 2000 Q4 aka Halloween.
When I downgrade to the pdisk-0.7-2 RPM from LinuxPPC 1999, it works as
it is supposed to. Also I think I remember that the new pdisk works when
run with a 2.2 kernel. Only the combination of new pdisk and 2.4 kernel
doesn't work.

i have been told that some versions of pdisk do not use the ioctl to
the kernel correctly, perhaps thats why.  

What is weirder is that there is (almost) no source to be found for this
pdisk-0.8-1! On the LPPC 2000 source CD, there is no pdisk at all, and
in the LPPC 2000 Q4 source directory, there is the SRPM for the old
pdisk-0.7-2. I finally found the sources at the defunct dev-rel CVS
repository at gate.crashing.org.

i don't know.

There is a llseek-patch (by Tom Rini, IIUC) which seems to be the origin
of the problem. If I back it out, pdisk works again.

Is anyone successfully running pdisk-0.8-1 with kernel 2.4?

why use pdisk when you can use GNU parted?  here is the correct
solution to pdisk:

rm -rf pdisk 
get ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-1.4.5.tar.gz
tar -zxvf parted-1.4.5.tar.gz
cd parted-1.4.5
./configure && make && make install

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/