Are you wining about a 64-bit Intel cpu ?
Check IA-64 vs. x86-64 architecture. Check for AMD compatibility.
Uf coarse, BIOS is written for either one, many BIOSes really are crappy (motherboards sold with ebough CDROM drivers to full a juke-box).
FWIW, here is one fdisk I have, only OpenBSD reads all the data, other fdisks exit normally but either write junk or >/dev/null.
Code:
# fdisk wd0
Disk: wd0 geometry: 10011/255/63 [160836480 Sectors]
Offset: 0 Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending LBA Info:
#: id C H S - C H S [ start: size ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0: B6 0 1 63 - 1000 254 63 [ 125: 16080940 ] <Unknown ID>
*1: A6 1001 0 1 - 2000 254 63 [ 16081065: 16065000 ] OpenBSD
2: 83 2001 0 1 - 4000 254 63 [ 32146065: 32130000 ] Linux files*
3: 05 4001 0 1 - 10010 254 63 [ 64276065: 96550650 ] Extended DOS
Offset: 64276065 Signature: 0xB0D7
Starting Ending LBA Info:
#: id C H S - C H S [ start: size ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0: 94 99190 13 10 - 252985 160 5 [ 1593488178: 2470725932 ] Amoeba BBT
1: 6D 170160 126 20 - 7322 214 30 [ 2733628357: 1678980381 ] <Unknown ID>
2: E1 129346 194 61 - 67039 52 4 [ 2077955772: 3293996339 ] SpeedStor
3: 44 183192 158 6 - 82602 231 37 [ 2942989439: 2678993577 ] <Unknown ID>
No rw errors though for the last two months, but I finally decided to run the manufacturer's tests and wipe the drive.
Problems are Intel BIOS and hard drive related.
Better fdisk with sysutils/testdisk. Not the user friendly way.