Not very versed in Linux, but wanting to expand my competency.

Have tried to install both CentOS and FC6 in a XP sp2 enviorment for dual booting( Shuttle SS30G2 SE, w/ 2048 DDR ram and 250 gb SATA hdd ). Box was orginaly built using a SATA drive( Seagate 300 gb ) which appears as DISK 1 from XP's DISK Management Utility and has 4 primary NTFS partions on it.

Rather then fool around resizing partitions, I simply added a second IDE drive( Maxtor 200 gb ) to the Shuttle. I went with a IDE vs. a SATA drive as I could not get a matching SATA device easily here in Baja That second disk has not been formatted and can be seen as Disk 0 and unallocated from within XP's DISK Management Utility.

When I run the GUI install for either CentOS or Fedora FC6 it identifies device hda and says
"partition table on hda was unreadable. TO create partitions it must be intialized."
hdb is not located or otherwise mentioned- only hda. I would like to assume that hda is Disk 0, but can't be sure as there are existing partitions on Disk 1. I can't risk losing my data on Disk 1's data1 or data2 partions so am stumped and hoping for insight from others with more knowledge/insight on this topic...

Any way to know what disk is being probed and preped for the linux install?

Saludos
1red911

as root, run fdisk -l, you should get some ideal inside.

No luck on running fdisk -l as root from the install routine

I'm installing running linux -text and not the GUI install

Running Knoppix I ran fdisk -l as directed above. It shows the IDE drive as hda and the cdr/dvd as hdb. I am not seeing my SATA drive...would that be sba ?

The SATA drive is home to XP, which at this stage I would prefer having as my default boot drive. Am I getting into LILO config territory? I have not yet installed CentOS/FC6 but don't want to install and loose my access to XP.

Thanks in advance for the help;-)

Don't do anything before you understand how Linux works with drives and partitions.
Example for 4 IDE + 2 SATA + 2 USB devices, for kernel 2.6:
- hda - primary master drive;
- hdb - primary slave drive;
- hdc - secondary master drive;
- hdd - secondary slave drive;
- sda - first SATA drive;
- sdb - second SATA drive;
- sdc - first USB device;
- sdd - second USB device.

yes, and during installation you can press ctl-alt-f1,f2,...f7, inside you will have some place to check your partition.

I did install RHEL4 on machine that contained both SATA and IDE HD. The machine was built with sata and had windows on that and i added an ide hd to the ide cable connecting cdrom (i believe i added as ide slave disk). the installation went fine, it identified the sata disk as sda and ide as hdb and installed linux on hdb without any problem or doing any thing to windows data. So this can be done.

But i found this on the RedHat website regarding the problem ur facing:
C.3.3. Trouble with Partition Tables

If you receive an error after the Disk Partitioning Setup (Section 4.14 Disk Partitioning Setup) phase of the installation saying something similar to

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

you may not have a partition table on that drive or the partition table on the drive may not be recognizable by the partitioning software used in the installation program.

Users who have used programs such as EZ-BIOS have experienced similar problems, causing data to be lost (assuming the data was not backed up before the installation began) that could not be recovered.

No matter what type of installation you are performing, backups of the existing data on your systems should always be made.

here is the link http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/e...e-install.html


So I think u can go ahead and proceed with the initialization of hda as long as you dont need any data on the IDE drive and it should not create any problem for the data on ur SATA drive but definately a back up will be highly recommended.

As a newbie who did not understand to much about Linux I installed XP on the second SATA drive and SUSE 10.2 on the first. There was no way that I could get Grub to give me access to the XP drive.
After reading many posts here, I came across something called GAG. It seems to work with the Bios and lets you boot the XP partition or the Grub partition. It was very easy to use.
Does this help?

SATA drives are labeled "sd(a,b,etc.)", IDE interfaced "ATA" drives are labeled "hd(a,b,etc.)" If the installers were to mention "sda", then you should worry, because this is a serial ATA or "SATA" drive. But when it refers to it as hda, this is on the IDE channel, the same channel as the optical drives which is the channel that an ATA drive will be connected too. Hence it is looking at your new drive. Although I just did a dual boot last night with Mandrake, it did not mention the need to be initialized, probably just left that information out to avoid confusion. The new drive should not have any partitions/partition table, they need to be made.
Also, when it comes time to install the boot loader, it should recommend installing it on /dev/sda, that is the correct place to put it, which is in the MBR of the first drive set to boot in the bios.