Bug 157500

Summary:	lost partiton table due to alt-ctrl-del reset at boot-time ?
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Thomas Meindl <twm.mst>
Component:	Kernel	Assignee:	E-mail List <kernel-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Minor
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.0
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	output of hwinfo on Athlon2800+

Description Thomas Meindl 2006-03-12 21:36:11 UTC

While booting Linux on a multiboot-system (Linux,Windows), at a very early stage of the boot process, I pressed ctrl-alt-del to reset and boot Windows on hda. Next time I wanted to use Linux, grub couldn't find my reiser partition on hdb and the recovery-tool on the SUSE installation DVD couldn't find any of the partitions (- there should have been hdb1=extended, hdb5=swap, hdb6=root, hdb7=home). The very strange thing was, that after reentering the harddisk values in the BIOS via the AUTO option, all partions on hdb were there again. I thought this was an issue with my machine and forgot about it...

But today a friend of mine called me and told me, that he, too, lost his partition table, by doing exactly the same that I did. Contrary to me, he was able to recover it by using the tools provided by the SUSE-DVD (after a long lasting search process). 

I wouldn't have bothered you with this otherwise, (but I thought, better to let you know, than saying nothing), - so I really think there's some issue with booting the kernel and do a warm start at an very early stage (maybe 1 or 2 seconds after the kernel takes action).
I'm sorry that I can't provide more info, but as far as I remember, there was nothing unusual in the logs.

Comment 1 Olaf Kirch 2006-03-13 13:37:16 UTC

That sounds rather strange.

Can you provide hwinfo output of your system, please?

Comment 2 Thomas Meindl 2006-03-13 14:06:02 UTC

Created attachment 72557 [details]
output of hwinfo on Athlon2800+

Sure, here it is. It happened 'bout one month ago on my machine with a Maxtor 200GB hd (ata-Maxtor_6B200P0_B4102NMH). I'll try to get a hwinfo of my colleague's computer too, but it may take some time.

Comment 3 Chris L Mason 2006-03-20 01:38:18 UTC

It seems most likely that windows is causing this problem.  I'm not sure how much we'll be able to help until it can be reproduced by rebooting only into linux.  Please reopen when windows is not involved.