Hello, I'm trying to install Fedora 9 on a new system with no pre-installed OS. The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda 400GB SATA hard drive. The installation process went fine until I got to the partitioning section. I created the layout and entered the button to write the partition layout to disk. The computer became busy and was stuck on the screen for around 3 hours. I thought that since this is a new hard drive, it was being formatted first and that it was taking a while because it's somewhat of a large drive.

But, after three hours, I decided that there was a problem and I manually turned off the computer. When I restarted and went through the partitioning process again, everything went fine (even though I hadn't changed any of the options prior to this point from my previous attempt), the file systems were created, and the installation process continued.

My question is whether it's more possible that there was some unknown, arbitrary problem that resolved itself on my second installation attempt or whether the hard drive was being formatted on the first attempt and I, thinking something was wrong, stopped it after three hours before it was done. I don't know anything about the hardware. Could it be possible that a section of the hard drive is formatted, which might have enabled the partitioning the second time around, and the remaining section isn't? I'm guessing that's not the case, but I just wanted to make sure. If that is somehow the case, is there a diagnostic tool in linux that I can use to test the hard drive?

Thanks.

You can use the partition editor to look at the drive. When Parted deploys it will be displaying the necessary information. In the extreme upper right corner is the drive identification for the information displayed. It will tell you how big it thinks the drive is. Below he graphic display of the drive space should be the main partition and the extended partition which should contain the swap partition. These should add up to the size of your disk.

There would be a progress bar to show the format process. I think a thorough format of 400 GB would take that long, since a 80 GB drive takes close to 45 mins, but since there was no progress bar it is possible that the installation process must have crashed.

To test the drive you can use fsck command : fsck /dev/sda1