Yeah, my fault, dmesg shouldn't return anything because you are booting
with from read only media. . . Sorry about that.

Try getting to the terminal at the very beginning of the install process.

What sort of messages do you see while the boot disk is booting? Do you
see anything like the above (hda, ide0, etc.)? Does RH start a GUI right
away?

rh stops at a interface which allows you to use graphical or text interfaces, you can input differenet commands. i think when rh is probing i have seen hda come up but the text moves off to fast. is there a way of slowing it down. im at work at the moment but will be home to test it in 4 hours, thanks moses
bm1

You should be able to use
<Shift-PgUp> to scroll back up 1/2 page at a time, but this is only
useful once things stop scrolling, and if no graphical interface comes up.

before the graphical interface the bios says something like
-fixed 0 fujitsu
after rh anaconda has run

SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
SiS5597 ATA 33 controller
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfcf0-0xfcf7, BIOS settings: hdaMA,
hdbio
hda: FUJITSU MPE3064AT, ATA DISK drive
hdc: CRD-8322B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: 12672450 sectors (6488 MB) w/512KiB Cache, CHS=13410/15/63, UDMA(33)
hdc: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM drive, 128kb Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
Partition check:
hda:hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=0. sector=0
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0
unable to read partition table

thanks
bm1

I hate those damned smilies.

Ok, Your hard drive is being detected, but Linux finds a problem with the
partition table (I'm sure you noticed).
post the output of:
ls /dev/hda*

Look in /sbin for fdisk
ls /sbin/fdisk
If it's not there, look in /usr/sbin, /bin, /usr/bin

let's look at some useful information from the kernel:
ls /proc
ls /proc/ide

ls /dev/hda*

/dev/hda /dev/hda14 /dev/hda2 /dev/hda25 /dev/hda30
/dev/hda8 /dev/hda1 /dev/hda15 /dev/hda/20
/dev/hda/26 /dev/hda/31 /dev/hda/9 /dev/hda/10
/dev/hda/16 /dev/hda/21 /dev/hda/27 /dev/hda/4
/dev/hda/11 /dev/hda/17 /dev/hda/22 /dev/hda/28
/dev/hda/5 /dev/hda/12 /dev/hda/18 /dev/hda/23
/dev/hda/29 /dev/hda/6 /dev/hda/13 /dev/hda/19
/dev/hda/24 /dev/hda/3 /dev/hda/7

ls /sbin/fdisk
no such file or diectory

ls /usr/sbin
theres a lot of files on this directory and i can see fdisk

be back in 5 hours, thanks
bm1

i didnt put those stupid smily faces on

/usr/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda

I know you didn't put the smilies on, that's one of the reasons I hate them.
=-}

i run /usr/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda
then rh gave me the command line back with no errors, i restarted the install again?( am i suppose to carry on from the same install? ). the partition errors are still in anaconda and the install didnt work.

ls /proc
1 6 e820info kcore mounts sys
10 7 execdomains kmsg net sysvipc
11 75 fb ksyms partitions tty
12 9 filesystems loadavg pci uptime
2 bus fs locks scsi version
3 cmdline ide lvm self
4 cpuinfo interrupts mdstat slabinfo
40 devices iomem meminfo speakup
41 dma ioports misc stat
5 driver irq modules swaps

ls /proc/ide
drivers hda hdc ide0 ide1 sis

thanks, what is this info for anyway? just wanting to learn.
bm1

i found this page on google

https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail...ry/015077.html

it looks like this guy had the same problem but on a bigger scale. what you think. he tried something like this

> > I'm using Red Hat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.7-10) with ext3 filesystem
> > (journalled-ordered).
> > I ran "fsck.ext3 -c" and a lot of bad sectors were discovered,
> > finally I ran "fsck.ext3 -p -v -c" and fsck reported 220 bad blocks
> > found
> > on root partition /dev/hda.Despite of that,I nomore see same errors as
> > above,

ive tried to follow what hes done but dont know what to look for.

when i do
fsck.ext3 -c
i get
usage: fsck.ext3 [-panyrcdfvstFSU] [-b superblock] [-B blocksize]
[-I inode_buffer_blocks] [-Pprocess_inode_size] [-l|-L bad_blocks_file]
[-C fd] [-j ext-journal] device
bm1

Ok, if you didn't get any errors back from fdisk, it probably means you
don't have a partition table on your hard drive. I'm not yet sure
why RH won't partition the hard drive, so we're going to do this
ourselves. . . Try:
/usr/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda

/proc/ide shows what the kernel knows about the ide bus on your system
(same with anything under /proc).
post the output from:
cat /proc/ide/hda/settings
This tells us what settings (!) your hard drive has, we'll try to get it to
have some safe settings, if (for some reason) it has unsafe ones.
You can browse around in /proc, catting various files there. They'll
show up as 0 length files if you do a ls -l, that's because they are
virtual, that is they only appear in memory, and are completely dynamic
(mostly).

You need to specify the device fsck.ext3 is supposed to work on.
Anything within brackets "[]" is optional, anything not within brackets is
not optional (this is a pretty standard usage statement). So, the
minimum you have to do is:
fsck.ext3 /dev/hda/
However, this only works on a partiton with a filesystem. Your hard
drive doesn't seem to have a partition table, so this will simply fail.

/usr/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda
unable to open /dev/hda

cat /proc/ide/hda/settings
bios_cyl 13410 0 65535 rw
bio_head 15 0 255 rw
bios_sect 63 0 63 rw
breada_readahead 8 0 255 rw
bswap 0 0 1 r
current_speed 66 0 69 rw
failures 0 0 65535 rw
file_readahead 508 0 16384 rw
ide_scsi 0 0 1 rw
init_speed 0 0 69 rw
io_32bit 0 0 3 rw
keepseetings 0 0 1 rw
lun 0 0 7 rw
max_failures 1 0 65535 rw
max_kb_per_request 128 1 255 rw
multcount 16 0 16 rw
nice1 1 0 1 rw
nowerr 0 0 1 rw
number 0 0 3 rw
pio_mode write-only 0 255 w
slow 0 0 1 rw
unmaskirq 0 0 1 rw
using_dma 1 0 1 rw
wcache 0 0 1 rw

i tried to make it more easier to read, it looks good in the edit page not on the thread
cheers
bm1

im just looking in the bios and for the hard drive the type is on auto, i think this setting sets up the cylinders, heads and sectors.
would rh be having trouble recognising this? if so i dont know how to configure this
bm1

Ok, try:

/usr/sbin/hdparm /dev/hda
If you get something that looks like:

do:
/usr/sbin/hdparm -d0 /dev/hda
(man hdparm ==> read the manual page for hdparm, and for any
command I suggest you use. . .)
/usr/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda

/usr/sbin/hdparm /dev/hda
i get
/dev/hda: No such file or directory

/usr/sbin/hdparm -d0 /dev/hda
i get
setting using_dma to 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)

/usr/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda
there sounded like some activity from the hard drive, i got the command line back