How to get a 56G disk to be recognized by parted.

[Hans Deragon]

Greetings


  I want to split a 56G vfat partition into two partitions,
  one ext2 and another vfat.  So my plan is to resize the
  vfat to the end of the disk and create a new partition
  at the beginning.

  But when I try, I get the following error right on the start.
  Note that I am running Red Hat 7.1 with 2.4.2 kernel.

----->
address@hidden /root]# parted /dev/hdd
GNU Parted 1.4.7
Copyright (C) 1998-2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public
License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more
details.

GNU Parted's development is supported by Conectiva, www.conectiva.com

Using /dev/hdd
Warning: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hdd is
7299/255/63.
Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M.  You should check that this
matches
the BIOS geometry before using this program.
(parted) print
Error: Unable to open /dev/hdd - unrecognised disk label.
<-----

  Obviously, the OS reports the wrong geometry.  However, when I mount
  my current filesystem, the OS does mount it successfully:

----->
address@hidden genericdata1]# df -kh .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdd1              56G  9.8G   46G  18% /mnt/genericdata1
<-----

  The BIOS reports the following data regarding this disk:

    Cylinders               1024
    Heads                    255
    Sectors                   63
    CHS capacity            8422 MB
    Maximum LBA Capacity   60041 MB

  The BIOS is set to "Auto" to detect and setup the disk.

  Anybody got some suggestions on how to proceed from here?  I am not
  a partition guru, so I do not know much about the technical details of

  partitions.  I do not understand why Linux is reporting the wrong
  geometry but still can mount the 56G file system.


Sincerely,
Hans Deragon