Ok I've had RH7.2 running fine on some parts on my bench. It installed great on the drive that I was using temporarily.

I hook up the drive I will be using permanently, pop in the RH7.2 CD, boot and begin the installation. When I get to the partitioning part, I begin seeing errors like “partition table on /tmp/hda is inconsistent” and it won’t go any further. It doesn’t want to work with any combo whatsoever. I’ve drive manually partitioning with fdisk, letting the install do it, or using disk druid. No luck sooner or later it tells me cant read partition /dev/hda1 because it’s probably not formatted or would you like to initialize. This drive works great with anything else. I’ve installed XP and 2000 on it for a sanity check. I’ve hooked it up to another RH 7.2 box and it worked fine. The common thing that I seem to keep going back to is disk geometry. On almost every installation attempt, I see something about parted not liking the way the geometry is being reported…like: I should be 790,255,63 instead of 790,255,63. I’ve been around Unix (HP-UX, CLIX, Ultrix, etc) for years and years, but I’m new to linux.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I just had to specify the explicit drive geometry to the kernal at the cd's boot prompt.

linux hda=790,255,63 (Cyl,Heads,Sectors)

When I got to the partition part, I used disk druid to make my partitions and bingo!, everything worked fine.