hard disk bad geometry

Hi
I installed linux and win xp on my laptop ..It was done by the computer technicians in the university..They created the partition using linux..Both the operating systems r working fine..When i installed partition magic on xp..It failled to open saying that there r no dirve names...I saw the drive names r not assigned for linux....When i looked in to the error log file of partition magic it diaplayed the there is some error in hard disk geometry...Saying that the partiton ended in 55 instead of 63 and it did not end in the end of the cylinder..Is it a serious problem..Is there any way to come otu of this problem & install partiton magic with out disturbing my operating systems
thanks
ganesh

i have had problems also installing partition magic on some machines, the reason is third party utilities, not being sure what they used to make the partitions i can only guess. if the disk had been setup with a windows install disk this wouldnt be a issue, i have come accross this when they were set up with seatools(seagate) and western digital's drive setup disk. this is not a problem for your system, it will work fine, just pm will not install, or if it does will give errors like the one you posted. what do you need the partition magic for?

I am having the same problem.. The system works fine, with winXP and Linux-9 dual boot, but 25GB of my hard disk is missing !!!

I installed winXP on the 1st 10 GB..
During installing Linux, I gave 500MB for /boot, /dev/shm, and then made a big extended partition of the rest. I left 25GB of this space to be allocated later as FAT32 (so that I can access it from both windows and linux)

Throughout the installation of linux, I kept getting the error about misalligned cylinder boundary. and now I cannot use the 25 GB I originally left. Partition magic gives "hard disk bad geometry" and "Error 117: cannot find partition drive letter"..

I would appreciate any help..

This is how my partition table looks like:
# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1276 10243768+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda2 1277 1301 200812+ 83 Linux
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda3 1302 1326 200812+ 83 Linux
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda4 1327 9729 67497097+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda5 1327 1453 1020096 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 1454 2345 7164958+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 2346 3365 8193118+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 3366 6552 25599546 83 Linux

Well i don't know if is the same problem you guys are talking about, but i have one with my WD40BB.

It had 2 partitions (FAT32) and after a crash it can only "read" the one of them. (not the primary)
I can read and write on the one but WinXP cannot write the other one. It recognises it as unformated and through Partition Magic 8 it describes it as "BAD".
Before PM8 starts there is a message of bad geometry and that i should delete the partitions of that disk before attempting any other action there. But the only thing i can do is format the drive and then delete it. During the format (by PM8 or DOS) the computer crushes.So. No format, no partitioning, no deletion, no hard disk...

I could really use any help asap..
thanx

i've been through this kind of problem.
some third party tool, they help to save you time but they dont help you save your data, you will need to help yourself.

Taking a safe way and think of [time] vs [data] which one is more important to you, then pick one and make up your mind.

Below is a tip, and it might help you. (got it from partition magic)
Just like i said, HELP yourself, back up all your data before you go on.

-- begin --
Under OS/2, PartitionMagic must be able to find the drive letter for each partition before modifications can be made. There are various reasons why OS/2 might not be able to find a drive letter for each partition. For example, a driver on your
system may change the drive letters from their defaults, or your partitions may not have serial numbers.
You may also see this error when running PartitionMagic under Windows.
The solution is to run PartitionMagic from DOS or from MS-DOS mode (in Windows 95 or Windows 98). When PartitionMagic runs from DOS or from MS-DOS mode, it does not need to be able to find the drive letter for each partition. Thus, if the problem indicated by this error message is the only problem, PartitionMagic can run successfully.
-- end --


chaseme: you can have all partition in NTFS format and it still can be read in Linux. if you are keen enough, follow the instructions in this site to get it up and running.
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

(^^;?(Yeah! I may be also of no help for you. I suppose there's no way other than librating patition once. Maybe it needs to be low-level formatted.)

Any OS was (Disk) Operating System from the first. Each OS has different approach to HDD and their partition utility behaves according to the said approach. Then It is natural that there happens incompatibilities when each one excercises similar low-level operation under different approach.

We may call this software conflicts compared with IRQ conflicts of similar devices. The only difference is that there remains its effect and it is unrestorable until its libration even if the other is removed.