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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hi Valdikss,

On Sat, Jul 08, 2023 at 09:17:54PM +0300, ValdikSS wrote:

Hello list,

I was getting very slow boot speeds on old WYSE C10LE thin client with VIA C7 >CPU and Phoenix bios (year 2008). This is due to combination of BIOS, GRUB, >and what I assume Debian-installer bugs.

Long story short, Debian writes strange/incorrect C/H/S values to the MBR >partition table upon installation, to which testdisk software complains as >"Bad relative sector".

Nothing should be caring about C/H/S at all in the 21st century. Using
C/H/S only allows you to access 515MB of disk [1]. *Everything* these
days uses LBA instead.

What makes you think that the BIOS on this old machine cares about
C/H/S? What happens if you tweak the partitioning by hand when
installing?

I've tried to install Debian 12 i386 to a 8G disk, using qemu, with guided >automatic partitioning. Testdisk data right after the installation:

Disk testz.img - 8589 MB / 8192 MiB - CHS 1045 255 63
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors

1 P Linux 0 32 33 919 199 48 14774272

Bad relative sector.
2 E extended 919 232 16 1044 52 32 1996802

Bad relative sector.
No partition is bootable
5 L Linux Swap 919 232 18 1044 52 32 1996800

Bad relative sector.

It seems that testdisk automatically recalculates C/H/S values and shows >corrected data (in the table above).

Here's what really is present in the MBR (data of the first partition entry):

$ ./mbr_my.py testz.img Status: 0x0
C/H/S start: 4 4 1
Part type: 0x83
C/H/S end: 1023 254 2
LBA of first sector: 2048
Sector count: 14774272

fdisk/cfdisk and parted all create partitions for which testdisk does not >complain.

d-i drives parted to make partitions...

[1] https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/lba-chs-bios-prob.685748/


--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com "We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could
ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs." -- Mike Andrews

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Sun, Jul 09, 2023 at 12:15:35AM +0300, ValdikSS wrote:

On 09.07.2023 00:02, Steve McIntyre wrote:

Nothing should be caring about C/H/S at all in the 21st century. Using C/H/S only allows you to access 515MB of disk [1]. *Everything* these
days uses LBA instead.

What makes you think that the BIOS on this old machine cares about
C/H/S?

My machine is old, it's a 32-bit CPU from 2006 in a machine from 2008.

That's sad. My 486 from 1993 uses LBA correctly and doesn't care about
CHS at all. How could a machine from 15 years later when disks much
much bigger than CHS supported possibly care at all?

--
Len Sorensen

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)