What does this indicate?

[thinkpad1]

I hope it's just a coincidence but I'm having some issues partitioning my drive. I dropped something on the keyboard a while back and was worried about drive damage. I ran drive diagnostics tests and there wasn't much returned that was negative. Well, one bad sector someplace.

Anyway, 'not familiar with the problem I'll be explaining but I hope it's A)not serious B) fixable

I get these warning messages when I run the fdisk and sfdisk commands:

sfdisk:
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary. DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.

fdisk one:
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

What should I do?

Should I reinstall Windows or re-arrange partitions or?

[GomJabbar]

Try running drive diagnostics from the hard drive manufacturer. [I have the links below saved in a text file. Hopefully they are current.]

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test

Fujitsu Diagnostic Tool and Erase Utility

Samsung HUTIL

SeaTools for DOS

PC Doctor for DOS bootable CD - ThinkPad

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (CD)

[thinkpad1]

I did this one already:

Samsung HUTIL

I installed PC Doctor, too.

I posted this previously.

Sooo confused now... (of what to do)!

[tom lightbody]

personally, I've never been concerned about partitions not ending
on cylinder boundaries: never seems to make any difference

[emeraldgirl08]

I remember reading a thread about resizing Windows. Did you resize any of the partitions and if you did how did you do it? Windows partitions might have to be resized differently than Linux parts. If you used a Linux program such as GParted then with resizing Windows there is an option to tick/untick. I also heard it is better to resize under Windows on Disk Management program.

[thinkpad1]

Well, when I originally posted the question and issue, I didn't touch Windows. I have since resized the XP partition with GParted. I made it larger. I changed it from 15GB to 30GB. I had created all four primary partitions so I guess you could say I merged two of them so I have XP as a 30GB partition now. I checked off the round off function so that warning is gone now.

I still have a similar warning for my Extended Partition, though.

I will probably re-do everything except leaving the 30GB XP partition as is. Even though I am not planning on using XP much, I still use some Windows stuff and borrow people's hardware who are Windows users.

With a 40GB Windows partition and the rest being 120GB, that is still enough for Linux partitions and 1GB for swap.

[emeraldgirl08]

^^^

Sounds like you got a plan

I also dual boot and am trying out flavors of linux. I'd like to give the Apple OS a run sometimes. Part of my slowly growing expertise in partitioning and setting up boots for myself is doing it and learning from my "uh ohs." I've wound up with unusable space (empty space that gparted would not let me use as much as I wanted to!) and strange megabytes of empty space between partitions. I'm the comp tech here at home. Everyone loves to just use the computer but as far as maintenance goes- my last name should have been "can you look at this?"