HD Install :: 1st time user has HD issue

Having a hard time getting DSL to install to an HD. cfdsik shows the drive I would like to install to (/dev/hda) as well as my second disk (/dev/hdb) The problem is cfdisk cannot read the partition table of EITHER disk, and shows both of them as free space. Tried to wipe out /dev/hda and start fresh but always get locked up when I try to write.

Here's the tail of my dmesg:

fat: bogus logical sector size 0
vfs: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:01
fat: bogus logical sector size 0
vfs: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:02
fat: bogus logical sector size 65535
vfs: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:40
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16)

My cdrom drive is /dev/hdd and is alone on ide 2. hda and hdb are on the primary.

Anyone care to take a stab?

I think http://www.toms.net/rb/ comes with fdisk, maybe you could try fdisk instead of cfdisk. Also, are you running cfdisk as root?

[QUOTE]I think http://www.toms.net/rb/ comes with fdisk, maybe you could try fdisk instead of cfdisk. Also, are you running cfdisk as root?

This is what I've done so far:

Initial install was tried with a 32mb fat partition marked bootable with command.com and cdrom drivers on it (hda1) 500mb ext2 (hda2) 500 swap (hda5) fat was setup using windows fdisk, ext2 and swap were made with slackware 10.2. Boots to lilo (installed from slackware 10.2) on the MBR

sudo su cfdisk shows the entire drive as one big open space with NO partitions. OK, pull out the slackware disk again and wipe /dev/hda clean of it's partitions

Again sudo su cfdisk shows one open space. Attempt to make partitions leads cfdisk and gui lock (does the same from console)

/dev/hdb1 is a 60gb reiser drive with no other partitons. It also is reported in sudo su cfdisk as one unpartioned space.

So my conclusion is sudo su cfdisk cannot read the partition tables on my setup.

cdrom boots as /dev/hdd I'm going to try to switch cdrom to /dev/hdc to see if anything different happens. Somthing tells me having the cdrom as /dev/hdc........

Here's another error I've found in dmesg, WAY near the top:

autoconfig devices
cant locate module block-major-2

I get this error on PCs that don't have a floppy drive attached. Do you have a floppy drive?

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