install/hard drive format issues

Forum: HD Install
Topic: install/hard drive format issues
started by: O_o

Posted by O_o on Dec. 06 2005,04:01

Ok, first of all, I love DSL... I'm a total noob at this...
Anyways, my dad's old computer crapped out (p2 333mhz, 4 gig hd) so I formatted the hard drive, and everything installed just fine.
Well, I went to install dsl on a spare hard drive I had bought for my machine (P4 1.8ghz, win xp, 750megs ram, installing on a 6 gig hd), but it turns out that the hard drive was originally formatted for a mac. Is there any I can reformat it from the livecd? I don't have the resources to make a boot disk and have no way to boot into the command prompt... Any ideas?

Posted by skaos on Dec. 06 2005,13:17

Boot the live CD, open a terminal window and run "fdisk -l" (without quotes) to find out the device name of your 6 GB disk. The point here is to be 200% sure that you don't mess up your XP disk (which most likely is /dev/hda). Then you can run "cfdisk /dev/hdX" (again without quotes, replacing X with your device/disk), deleting all previous partitions and finally creating linux partitions. I suggest that you make a 64 MB swap partition and maybe a 500 MB linux partition. The rest you may use for experimenting with other distros.

Posted by O_o on Dec. 06 2005,20:15

It says that the disk is read only...
dsl@box:~$ fdisk -l
Cannot open /dev/hda
dsl@box:~$ cfdisk /dev/hda

Screen goes black and says
FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk

Any ideas?

*edit* I tried opening the disk through XP, but xp just recognizes it as being plugged in and won't actually open it.

Posted by skaos on Dec. 07 2005,11:32

Sorry, I forgot to say that you have to be root to run these commands.

Posted by O_o on Dec. 08 2005,00:30

Hey, thanks! It works great now, and I am *finally* able to have both windows and *nix on my pc without swapping hard drives! Thanks for all the help! :laugh: