hi,

I have an intel D915GAG motherboard with inherently an intel serial ata controller. the hard drive is a sata 200GB western digital (WD2000JD). I have no floppy drive, just a cd/dvd rw and dvd-rom.

the cd boots fine and finds the two cdroms under hda and hdb respectively.

when running cfdisk i get the following:

"opened disk read only - you have no permission to write"

I have tried a quite a few different kernels all with the same results

kernels used:(of the 2.4.29 flavor)
sata.i
raid.s
bare.i
bareacpi.i
adaptec.s
ataraid.i
scsi.s scsi2.s scsi3.s

The kicker is that mandrake finds it with no problem labeling the entire disk
sda with the desired partition=sda5

Are you opening it as root?

yeah, everything has been as root.

I have installed slackware quite a few times on different machines
but have never seen anything like this

Does cfdisk actually list the partition(s) on the device, even if it opens it "readonly"? What is dmesg showing for sda?

sorry for the slow replies but here we go

cfdisk does not show anything but what i quoted above, if i hit any key after that message
it asks me if i want to start with a zero partition table. But of course i dont want to do that
since i would lose everything.

looking through dmesg for anything "sda" i come across a few things

sda through sdc is reserved for my 4 in 1 cardreader

sdd is where the interesting stuff happens. here is the long of the short of what i got from dmesg

sdd: Read Capacity Failed
Status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
sdd I/O error: dev 08:30 sector 0
Unable to read partition table
SCSI singledevice 0 0 0 4
all the way to
SCSI singledevice 0 0 0 77

and that is the end of dmesg

try 'cfdisk /dev/sda'

Problem is that that board has intel sata/ide chip and both types of drives. The 10.2 test26s(2.6.13) kernel may handle things better or you can try the 2.6.14 or 2.6.15 kernel from SW current. Intel may have updated drivers and BIOS for you. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html discusses what you can do--regarding sata,controller chip, kernel version,intel-piix,libata with passthru and such. Good luck.

i have the same mobo, and i have also my harddrive througth the sata interface. The problem is that cfdisk by default searches in /dev/hd, and your cdrom is under /dev/hda (read-only). You need to specify with "cfdisk /dev/sda" to tell cfdisk to look at your sata hd.

Hope that helops.

PD. sorry about my english, is not my main language.

I also getting the same problem I tried with Slackware 10 with 160 GB Sata hdd