Hey all ...

4 hrs later ive decided to seek professional help :s ... ok heres the deal ..

Ive just installed ubuntu, got 2 drives, one 40 the other 80 ... ubuntu is on the 40 no probs will swap partition etc ...

The 80 was used as data stoarge back when windows was on the 40, so its NTFS ..

Being that i wish to write to this drive, ive been trying to format into FAT32 (or similar filesystem readable by linux) with 0 success :s ..

I can mount it fine, read it and execute it but cant write, so i followed these steps:

fdisk /dev/hdb1
I get that warning about my number of cylinders exceeding 1024 etc..
n (new partition)
p, 1 (Primary 1 .... btw im only wanting a single partition here as a dump for storage)
default first cylinder and last cylinder (last cylinder appears to default as max)
w (write partition)

then i get a (not so friendly) error 22: invalid argument message that states:

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 22:Invalid argument,
The kernel still uses old table
The new table will be used at next reboot.
Syncing disks.

I called bluff and was right, a reboot solved nothing and i was left with the ntfs partition ...

HELP !!! ..

edit: mkdosfs had no effect on this for some reason ... did it after and before partitioning .. not sure if this is used for such cases though

Did you remove all the partitions on the disk before you created the new partition?

thanks for the quick response ... and yep, the disk was completely clear before creating the new partition

From fdisk's main menu what is the output of the p command (print)? Only thing I can figure here is fdisk is coming up with some illogical head/sector/cylinder information.

Disk /dev/hpb1: 80.0 GB, 80015491584 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track,155039 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

got a bad feeling ive fsuked something right up now aswell .. tried cfdisking it and now it thinks its a solaris partition :|

I'm stumped here... cfdisk says there is a Solaris partition? I wonder if a low-level format would save you here... though I hate to suggest that as it could destroy the drive completely.