Can't mount partitions on HD with Dynamic Drive Overlay

[jim1944]

I have a multiboot system with Windows 98 and DOS on the primary master HD (Maxtor 20 GB) and OS/2 and Red Hat 7 on the primary slave (Seagate 120GB). The Seagate was recently installed because of a problem with the original HD I had as primary slave (Maxtor 80GB).

When I installed the Seagate, bootup froze at autodetecting that HD and, as suggested by the Seagate installation manual, I jumpered it for capacity limitation and "prepared" it with the Seagate-supplied disk utilities which installed something called Dynamic Drive Overlay that gets invoked before any OS gets booted up. This resulted in the BIOS recognizing the HD as something like a 30GB HD but Windows, DOS (at least Partition Magic running from the DOS partition) and OS/2 don't seem to have any problem seeing and dealing with this HD at its full capacity. I was able to restore all the partitions from the original HD to the Seagate HD including the Linux partitions (several ext2 and a swap).

But there is some odd stuff:
1. I have to boot Red Hat from a boot floppy. It won't boot from the Boot Manager.
2. I can only successfully boot one of two OS/2 partitions.
At this point I think those problems are the result of some corruption associated with the original HD problem. However there are other issues:
3. I can't mount the partitions on the Seagate HD from Knoppix (5.0.1) but I can mount them from Red Hat.
4. fdisk -l /dev/hdb displays nothing in Red Hat but displays the following in Knoppix:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 1023 8217243 54 OnTrackDM6

fdisk displays what you would expect for /dev/hda in both Red Hat and Knoppix.

So, oddly, in Red Hat mount works but fdisk doesn't for the Seagate HD. At least with Knoppix neither works.

I suspect the last two problems have to do with the Dynamic Drive Overlay causing the drive to not be recognized correctly in Linux. Any ideas on how to deal with this?

One other thing that is a little odd about my Seagate HD setup: the ExtendedX partition was created using Partition Magic and was created before the first (and only) primary partition. This makes the ExtendedX partition /dev/hdb1 because it is the first entry in the partition table and the first primary is /dev/hdb2 because it is the second entry in the partition table. However, the primary partition is at the begining of the drive because, when I created the ExtendedX partition, I created it at the end of the HD. The logical partitions within the ExtendedX partition are /dev/hdb5, hdb6, etc. I know this is a little unusual but that's the way the previous HD was set up and it worked fine.

Thanks
Jim

[jim1944]

With a little research I found the answer to my problem. At the Knoppix boot prompt type: knoppix hdb=remap63.

Mount works, fdisk shows all the partitions, all partitions show up on desktop.

Jim