Gentoo fdisk Unwriteable Harddisk

[TechSpiritNRG]

Hi all -

Goal :
Install Gentoo on 80G hd. (new hd, fresh outta static)

Method :
Using the packaged fdisk that came with the distro. fdisk /dev/hda

Problem :
Create new partition, wait! My hd is only 390MB?
And at the bottom it states my drive is Unwriteable.

Any and all ideas are enthusiastically welcomed

-TSNRG

[ironwill99]

I have a few questions for you before I make a recomendation. Are you using the latest version of Gentoo? Are you using a SATA drive? Have you determined that the drive is not DOA?

[TechSpiritNRG]

The distro is 2005.0 for the A64.

The hd is ATA133.

I am 95% positive it is not DOA.

Right through fdisk it shows as being a 361.92MB hd, however that is easily fixed by changing the geometry - which would be fine if I could write to it.

"You will not be able to write to the partition table."

[ironwill99]

Sounds like a bad hard drive to me. I have been playing around with gentoo for a few weeks now and I am by no means an expert but it actually sounds like you have a bad hard drive or a bad ata133 cable. I have seen bad cables cause strange things like this to happen. Sorry for being so late to respond.

[TechSpiritNRG]

Actually - Last night I broke the comp down to bare bones, hooked it all back up, and it's going again. After the days and many hours of stressing out over it... I have came to one simple conclusion.

I am an idiot.

In the swapping around of harddisks and cdroms between two systems, I got my cdrom cable and my harddisk cable switched. So my cdrom was in IDE1 and my harddisk was in IDE2. Only time I've ever had such a simple flub, it ended up confusing me to no end. I've got people on at least 5 forums and god knows how many tech chat rooms boggled too. Oh well - the solution is always insanely simple...

I have already dealt with a bad cable, and I keep it around for testing other cables, ie. try the drive with the bad one, then try with the one in question.

Anyways, thank you very much for your responses - and be sure to add this in the ol' memory banks in case you run across anyone else who you may come across with a similar problem.