drive and partition problems

[tuxracer]

I want Debian or a Debian-based distro on my Thinkpad T41.

The problem is, I am getting warnings or errors when I check the disk drive.

Both fdisk and sfdisk give similar warnings to do with the cylinder boundaries. I have googled, checked various Linux (generic and specific to distro) forums and I still feel lost as ever.

I am not sure what to do now. I am guessing I might have to reinstall or buy a new drive.

This is my output:
fdisk -l gives:

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fdisk -l  

Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xfa6efa6e

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1913    15361888+   7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda2            1913        3825    15360000+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3            3825        5737    15360000+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4            5737       19457   110206431+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5            5738        5992     2048287+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6            5993       12494    52227283+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7           12495       19457    55930266   83  Linux

sfdisk:

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# sfdisk -uS -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 19457 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0

  Device Boot    Start       End   #sectors  Id  System
/dev/hda1   *        63  30723839   30723777   7  HPFS/NTFS
               end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,239,63)
/dev/hda2      30723840  61443840   30720001   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3      61443841  92163841   30720001   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4      92163842 312576704  220412863   5  Extended
/dev/hda5      92164905  96261479    4096575  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6      96261543 200716109  104454567  83  Linux
/dev/hda7     200716173 312576704  111860532  83  Linux

Any ideas or recommendations of what to do now?

I basically want a multi-boot setup on this 160GB IDE/ATA drive. Windows XP and Linux. I have Debian on my desktop and have used Linux but I'm still not familiar with the partitions setup. I have used GParted but I am wondering if something is wrong with the disk. I ran some disk diagnostic programs in Windows and one sector was bad. I don't know if that has anything to do with the cylinder issues or if it is just the way I partitioned. Also, I dropped something on the keyboard a while back but the diagnostics test only found the one problem, a bad sector. I have read of the cylinder boundary issues when I googled but there wasn't a universal solution. I have no idea of what to do next so I hope to receive some ideas. I thought maybe reformat the entire drive and start from scratch? I don't know if resizing or redoing the setup will help. Partition 1 is stated to not end on a cylinder boundary so I don't know how to fix that. I tried testdisk but it didn't seem to change anything.

Help?

[smallchange]

Is it creating any problems for you? I have seen this before, usually after using gparted, and other than the bother of seeing the message from time to time it works just fine. Unless you are seeing problems I would say just use it.