fdisk displays incorrect number of heads
 

I'm trying to format my hard drive with fdisk and I want to implement two partitions in raid0. I set up one drive fine, but fdisk reads the heads wrong on the second disk. It says 255 heads on the first drive and 16 heads on the second. The problem is that fdisk displays different numbers in the beginning/end columns and the number of blocks is different even when the partitions are the same size.

How can I force fdisk to use the same head number on both drives? How can I make sure that I get two same size partitions at the end of the drive? Or is there a better solution?

I've tried sfdisk and cfdisk and it's the same thing.

For RAID of any description, you must have at least two hard drives, it will not succeed with two partitions. Secondly, all HDD's must be the same size for RAID!

I have two disks. I want to use mdadm to set up RAID. I don't want to use my crappy motherboard RAID. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear, I had just assumed people who could answer my question would guess that I want to use mdadm, since that is the best software RAID solution.

Ok, are both sizes the same? I can't imagine why fdisk would give different numbers unless different sizes?

Hmm... The problem is that I don't know what to input into fdisk to make the two partitions the same size, since fdisk is showing two different head sizes on the disks so the block numbers come out different. I'll repost with pics of what I mean, so you can see for yourself. I have to reboot since I'm in windows now.

OK, when I rebooted the head size was identical on both drives, so everything is OK now. Weird. I guess it was just being stubborn.

Thanks for your help, though.

Good stuff! Glad it worked out for you. For the future, whenever I'm doing anything like this, I use gparted on the systemrescuecd