problem with 4.4 installboot

[Josh Grosse]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:52:20 -0600, Michael wrote

> I think I have all this right from fdisk and disklabel:
> 40 gig hd with 78125000 sectors

78,125,000 512-byte sectors is 40,000,000,000 bytes.  That's 40 "marketing"
gigabytes, or 37.25 "engineering" GB (obtained by dividing 40 billion by 1,024
three times).

> A6 starts 12546765 size 13350015 for 25896780

The MBR partition begins 5.9GB from the start of the hard drive, and is
12.35GB in size.

> "a" partition starts 12546765 and ends 13366080

The root partition begins 5.9GB from the start of the hard drive, and is
400MB.  It does not cross any BIOS limitation boundary I am *aware* of.  So
much for this guess.  As for CHS geometry: if your hard drive electronics is
reporting 63 sectors per track and 255 tracks per cylinder, which is common
with modern IDE/ATA drives, then there is no obvious CHS geometry problem,
either, as your "a" partition starts on at the beginning of cylinder 780 and
is exactly 51 cylinders in size.

The only other thing I can think of is a possible CHS geometry other than
63/255.  The fdisk program will tell you if a different geometry is used ...
but based on how nicely things line up at 63/255, I doubt this is it.
 
> bios reads my 120 gig hd just fine, so I may try installing 4.4 on it
> today to see what happens. I also have an older IBM 350mhz machine I 
> may try also (if time allows today).
> 
> Thanks Josh for your help. Much appreciated :)

I didn't solve the problem, but I did confirm your CD is ok.  I'm now thinking
better brains will be more helpful.  Time to consider posting to misc at .  I
recommend posting on or after November 1, once 4.4 support begins.