HDD Install Need help (Linux N00bzorz)

Forum: HD Install
Topic: HDD Install Need help (Linux N00bzorz)
started by: paulschroeder90

Posted by paulschroeder90 on Mar. 29 2006,23:45

Hi
I have an old compy, it has a PI 133 MHz, 81mbs of ram, American megatrends BIOS, It has two Western Digital Cavier Hard disk Drives, the Master is about 8.5 gbs and the slave is 1.5 gbs.

I want to install Linux onto the Slave 1.5 gbs hard drive, windows 98 on the master(no problems with that) and boot using either Grub or Lilo (whatever i can get to work :laugh:

) but i can't partition it. In Cfdisk i can only partition HDA(8.5gbs master) and when i try to mount the other harddrive i get severel error messages

Can't find valid FAT filesystem
Bogus logical sector size: 20487

I know basically nothing about linux.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

-Paul

Posted by skaos on Mar. 30 2006,09:37

If you don't mind wiping the disk you can use this command and then try again:

dd if=/dev/zero /dev/hdb

This assumes your second disk is the primary slave. If it still doesn't work, you can try this to check the disk (note that this wipes the disk as well):

badblocks -svw /dev/hdb

Posted by green on Mar. 30 2006,15:00

When you use cfdisk, you need to be root:

sudo su
cfdisk /dev/hdb

You have to tell cfdisk to look at /dev/hdb, if it is hdb.
By default, cfdisk looks at /dev/hda.

I did a forum search for cfdisk and there were tons of results.
Here is one to get you started:
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....=cfdisk >

Posted by anaconda on Mar. 30 2006,19:36

and sometimes sfdisk works when cfdisk doesn't (you have to be root)
you can try:

Code Sample

sfdisk -l /dev/hdb

It lists the current partition table of hdb. (no danger of destroying anything.)

If that worked, then you can partition your hdb with sfdisk.

Posted by larkl on Mar. 30 2006,23:23

You can also try something like < AEFDisk > that'll let you wipe out all of the partitions first and/or install a clean DOS MBR. Lots of other similar utilities available.

Posted by paulschroeder90 on Mar. 31 2006,03:39

Thanks for all the help
-Paul