unrecognised disk label

[Tim Cantin]

Greetings,

I am using parted for the first time, and I have the 23-page documentation. 
Booting from a GNU Parted boot floppy, and running the command "parted" it 
guesses that I have /dev/hda (which is correct; currently a 20GB disk with a 
single Windows 98 partition). It also displays a warning as follows:

Warning: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is 2482/255/63.
Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M.  You should check this this matches
the BIOS geometry before using this program.

Upon checking the in the BIOS I found that it is set to "Auto", and does not 
show me the geometry it detected... lame!

So when I type the "print" command in parted's interactive mode I get the 
following error:

Error: Unable to open /dev/hda - unrecognised disk label

I'm thinking of running the "mklabel msdos" command, but I thought I would ask 
first since the manual doesn't say whether or not that would damage any 
existing 
partitions. Would it??

Thank you in advance,
T

---
Tim Cantin, <address@hidden>, Manager, Systems & Networks
Wellesley College, Information Services, Systems & Networks
211 Simpson Hall East, 106 Central St., Wellesley, Massachusetts 02481-8203
http://www.wellesley.edu/~tcantin  phone: (781)283-3520  fax: (781)283-3682