Hi, I'm not exactly a newb, but perilously close.

I'm trying to install a brand new 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA HD on my Ubuntu 8.04 (2.6.24-29-server) machine. I'm following step by step instructions I found here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_1000631_hard-drive-linux.html

ls /dev/sd* finds the drive, but fdisk /dev/sdb returns 'unable to read'.

I've asked Google for answers, and I've been able to rule out the following possibilities:
- Drive is fine, I bought four at once and swapped the drive to check. Swapped out drive is fine in Windows machine.
- SATA cable swapped out.
- SATA port swapped for definitely working SATA port.

Any ideas? Do I have to do anything in BIOS?

Thanks for your help.

To be (more) correct, that finds a device node.Try as root "fdisk -l" and "parted -l". They should complain if for example that disk is gpt.

Hardy is getting pretty old now, even for a LTS. It may be you need a later version to get updated tools - try a liveCD.

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Thanks syg00, fdisk -l doesn't return any information on the device at all. What does this indicate?

parted complained about that command.

I've checked the drives in BIOS, the drive shows but it's capacity is listed as 0. Would it help if I formatted the drive on a windows machine first?

That might imply you didn't use sudo.

Need more info, but I have had one situation where formatting in Windows worked. Hard to see how it would harm.

Hi robulus,

If the drive is listed as 0 capacity in BIOS it sounds to me like that is the problem. I have a Western Digital 2 TB drive in my server. It is shown in BIOS (on the addon hard drive controller card) with an appropriate size and I was able to access it and format it with no problem. If you have another machine you can try it in I would do that and see if/how it is recognized in BIOS.

Ken