[parted-devel] changes in 1.6.23 regarding disk geometry

[Florian Effenberger]

Hello,

we use Unattended (http://unattended.sf.net) for unattended Windows 
installations, and we ran into the infamous "NTLDR not found" problem 
when using recent Unattended snapshots. We nearly changed everything in 
the Linux boot disk, but nothing helped. The old Unattended worked fine, 
the CVS version didn't. True SATA disks (sdX devices) seem to be 
unaffeced, but IDE-emulated SATA disks or true IDE disks (hdX devices) 
seem to be affected *sometimes*, not on all machines.

After some debugging we found out that the culprit seems to lie in 
parted. Parted up to version 1.6.22 works just fine. It prints out a 
warning message

program parted is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it ti SG_IO

but it works just fine. parted beginning with 1.6.23 does *not* work 
fine. It creates faulty partition tables that lead to corrupt Windows 
installations. Even cfdisk or fdisk print out that the partition seems 
to be NC (non compatible).

I read that Patrick J. LoPresti from the Unattended team tried to fix 
this by the /proc/ide/hdX/settings device, but in our case, it does not 
seem to help.

What exactly has changed in 1.6.23, and, more important, is there a 
compatibility switch for newer releases, or are we stuck for the old 
version at the moment?

Thanks
Florian