uh, yeah! My entire system crashed and I decided to reinstall redhat 7.3 and not to install windows again. But everytime I triied to use diskdruid it told me something about exceeding the max number of cylinders......... So I got frustated and formatted my entire harddrive with an SCSI utility progam. Now when I go to install, it ask me if i want to validate the system, and then when I say yes it tells me that there is no valid system on which to install....or something of that genre. And to go check my hardware. Then it reboots my comp..........HELP!!!!!!!

Welcome to LQ, t0t0r0ui4!!

The habit of saving the exact error message would help a lot, especially if it doesn't make sense to you. Someone in the forum might be able to see what's wrong first shot out.

If only you'd answer the questions I have.

1) How big is your HDD? ( greater than 127 GB?)
2) Is it IDE/ATAPI or SCSI?
2) What scsi utility are we talking about? Windows based, Linux based, directly from within the BIOS - some kind of low level format utility ?

Thanks for the reply even though it made little sense:

.My hd is about 40 gigs

.Its a scuzzy

.I used the bios utility

Here are the exact error messages that I received after triing to use any of the partition options in the redhat 7.2 install:

First : The partition table on device SDA was unreadable. To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this drive.

Would you like to initialize this drive?

Second(regardless of if I say yes or no it tells me):

no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem.

I don't know where to go from here. I thought about installing windows to see if it would create a "readable partition table", and then install linux on top of that. But I then realized that I didnt actually have a windows disc to install from........

Alright, well thanks for the help........ Jean-Pierre

What I would do is..

1) Make a rescue floppy disk. Tomsrtbt is a good one. Download a follow instructions to write it to a blank floppy disk.
2) Boot from the floppy. Use the plain old fdisk utility to modify your partition table or write a new table. You may also create the partitions you need for /boot, /var and root if you intend to do so.
3) Try installing linux again and see what it says.

sounds like possibly your hardrive isnt formated corectly ... you said you had windows on and it crashed, well did you get rid of the Fat32 file system or NTFS which ever you have/had?