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Summary: After copying my old hard drive to a newer, bigger drive, I'm
getting warnings from fdisk that there's a problem with my partitions.
I'd like to figure out why, and what, if anything, I have to do about
it.

Details: I'm running Redhat 7.1, kernel 2.4.7-10 on an etower 466id.
My old hard drive was giving signs of giving out (not spinning up
every time), and I decided to replace it before it busted entirely. I
followed the directions at http://www.storm.ca/~yan/Hard-Disk-Upgrade
as closely as I could. Essentially, I installed the new drive as
slave, partitioned it, copied everything to it, and switched it to
master.

First problem: My bios autodetect saw the disk geometry as
12009/16/63. Since it was a 40 gig drive I didn't think that was
right, but the geometry wasn't printed on the drive, so I used fdisk
(fdisk v2.11) to get the values. It told me 77545/16/63, so I entered
those values in bios. I partitioned the new disk, mirroring the
partitions that my installation program had set up on the old disk,
which were these:

hda1 1 513 4120641 c fat32lba
hda2 514 1027 4128705 5 Extended
hda5 514 516 24066 83 Linux
hda6 517 1018 4032283 83 Linux
hda7 1019 1027 72261 82 Linux swap

hda5 was boot, hda 6 root. Because I wasn't bothering to transfer
windows, I made hdd1 linux native. And because this left a lot of disk
unused, I put the rest into one big partition at hdd3, starting at
1027 and ending at whatever number the end of the disk was (don't have
it written down). I tried to create hdd8, but fdisk only gave me the
option of 1-7 for some reason.

Second problem: When I tried to copy my files, cp -a quickly aborted
and told me the device was full. df -h showed hdd5 and hdd6 both full
to capacity at 240 MB each. This, even though the boot partition
should only have had 2 MB of files copied to it, and the root
partition should have had 3.5 or so gigs of capacity.

So, I mounted hdd3 as root, hdd1 as boot, and copied again. This time
everything went well, I installed lilo, changed fstab, stuck the new
disk in the master position, everything booted up, it looked good.

But when I run fdisk now I get this partition table:

--

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 33 258520+ 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(512, 15, 63) should be (512, 254, 63)
/dev/hda2 33 65 259056 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63)
/dev/hda3 65 4866 38565072 83 Linux
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63)
/dev/hda5 33 33 1480+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 33 64 252976+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 64 65 4504+ 83 Linux

--

Notice this is a different geometry than fdisk showed me when this
disk was installed as slave. I changed the values in bios to these new
ones, but it doesn't make any difference to fdisk. Since then I found
out about the hdparm command (output at bottom), but I'm not sure
what, if anything, to do with those geometry figures.


So, is this partition table a problem, and how do I fix it? Advice
much appreciated.

--
hdparm output:

Model=MDT MD400BB-00DEA0, FwRev=05.03E05, SerialNo=MDT-MMAD17755203
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs
FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=57600, SectSize=600, ECCbytes=40
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=-66060037, LBA=yes, LBAsects=78165360
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5
AdvancedPM=no
Drive Supports : Reserved : ATA-1 ATA-2 ATA-3 ATA-4 ATA-5