A question related to sfdisk

[xiaoqin_qiu]

Hi,

I am trying to write a script to gather disk and partition information from a 
lot of Linux systems in our company. I like to use sfdisk utility with -s and 
-l options which not only show normal SCSI/IDE disk drives but logical drives 
created based on some RAID controllers. The fdisk utility seems not as powerful 
as sfdisk. However, I encountered a problem when using sfdisk. I hope someone 
can help me fix/explain it.

On a couple of new RedHat Enterprise Linux version 3 installation with the 
following configuration:
   Kernel version: 2.4.21-4.EL
   util-linux rpm version: 2.11y-31.1
   # sfdisk -v
   sfdisk version 3.07 (address@hidden, 990908)
   I have a single IDE disk drive on this sytem.

   When I run sfdisk, I got the following result:

   # sfdisk -s (Notes: I am expecting only /dev/hda: 22075200 and total: ... to 
show up)
   /dev/hda:  22075200
   /dev/hda1:    102280
   /dev/hda2:   5120136
   /dev/hda3:   1048824
   /dev/hda4:         1
   /dev/hda5:  15803896

   # sfdisk -l

   Disk /dev/hda: 43800 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track
   Units = cylinders of 516096 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

      Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *      0+    202     203-    102280+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda2        203   10361   10159    5120136   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3      10362   12442    2081    1048824   82  Linux swap
   /dev/hda4      12443   43799   31357   15803928    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
   /dev/hda5      12443+  43799   31357-  15803896+  83  Linux
   Warning: start=63 - this looks like a partition rather than
   the entire disk. Using fdisk on it is probably meaningless.
   [Use the --force option if you really want this]

   Why did this happen and how to fix it?

Thank you very much for your help!

Xiaoqin Qiu
Agilent Technologies, Inc.