Hard drive woes

[Duane Attaway]

On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Kurt Kessler wrote:

> I have a 30GB Western Digital drive that does not want to seem to
> format. I have tried to fdisk it several times, to no avail. I finally
> have a bit of time, so I just decided to try and install linux on it to
> kill anything that may be on it, and perhaps fix this problem. My bios
> (which is current) sees it half of the time.. (yes, sometimes it do, and
> sometimes it do not) I put in my RH 8 cd and booted, its going through
> everything just fine, untill its time to partition/format the drive. It
> tells me that it is an "invalid file system" and asks if i want to retry
> or abort. I clicked retry several times, then it says "the disk is not
> initialized" and asks me if I would like to initialize it. I click yes,
> and then get "An error has occured, no valid decvices were found on
> which to create new file systems. Please check your hardware for the
> cause of this problem"

The fdisk under linux can do all the geometry and resizing you will 
possibly need in this case.  Some BIOS chips in computers will only 
recognize smaller drives upon bootup, leaving the rest for the operating 
system to figure out.  You may have to leave the boot partitions 
completely under the first 512MB of the drive so the BIOS can see it.  
The BIOS is a simple creature.  It doesn't know much.  If it sees the 
bootable partition above that 512MB ceiling, it could get confused.  I'm 
guessing this is a slightly older computer for all this to be happening.

Linux only needs about 20MB for a /boot partition.  The "format" will be 
the creation of the filesystem, which should take about a minute or less.  
It doesn't really need to scan the whole drive or anything during the 
format, just to place its superblocks and such.  That's about it.

Let me know if putting the /boot partition entirely below the first 512MB 
doesn't work.  Once the kernel is booted from there, your computer has the 
full resources to figure out just about any drive configuration 
automagically after that.