fdisk said my HD didn't have valid partition table???

bombman · 08-24-2006, 09:21 AM

I'll try to be descriptive... I have two 80 GB hard drives in my laptop. Now I tried to run fdisk /dev/hdb to partition for slackware but it didn't dectect my hard drive. I tried fdisk /dev/hda, then it said my drive didn't have a valid partition table, then it showed my hard drive as only 660 MB. I tried it booting from the different kernels like baseacpi.i or pportide.i or whatever they're called, but I got the same result. I also tried some different hard drive names like /dev/hdc and stuff. What I really want to do is install linux on that second hard drive which has nothing on it. I guess my drives are nonstandard or something...
Of course Windows XP will show the partitions just fine, but I can't make a Linux partition with their Disk Managment program. Any solution?

Walman · 08-24-2006, 09:37 AM

Bombman

Try using "fdisk /dev/hda1" ," fdisk /dev/hdb1"

.

syg00 · 08-24-2006, 09:50 AM

Try "fdisk -l" (lower case ell) - let's see what you have.
hda looks like it might be a CD drive.

bombman · 08-24-2006, 10:43 AM

haha, i'm at work right now, so... I guess I can't give any more updates until tomorrow >_> I'll try all your advice though

bombman · 08-25-2006, 08:53 AM

I typed fdisk -l and nothing showed up, so I figured I was using the wrong kernel. My BIOS is very bare-bones and non-helpful, but I did notice it had SATA support enabled, so I booted from sata.i
sure enough, I found my 2 hard disks under dev/sda and dev/sdb, and dev/hda was indeed the cd-rom, because when I opened the tray, it didn't show up. Thanks for helping.

haertig · 08-25-2006, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bombman

I typed fdisk -l and nothing showed up

Possibly because you were not running it as root. You didn't specify how you were running fdisk -l. If it was from some LiveCD (Knoppix, etc.) then you might not have been running it with root privileges. SATA disks are listed with fdisk -l along with others, provided your system recognizes them in the first place, and you are running the command as root.

You can see my SATA listing below. Note the first two attempts were from a normal user (#1 was command not found, #2 was no output). The third attempt was using root privileges, and you can see the output showing my SATA drive.

Code:

$ fdisk -l
bash: fdisk: command not found
$ /sbin/fdisk -l
$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        5099    40957686    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            5100       10199    40965750    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           10200       14024    30724312+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda4           14025       19452    43600410    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5   *       14025       14030       48163+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           14031       14091      489951   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7           14092       14213      979933+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8           14214       19452    42082236   8e  Linux LVM
$

bombman · 08-28-2006, 11:53 AM

no, fdisk only saw the sata drives when I used the sata.i kernel, it didn't work with the other kernels, and I was logged in as root each time.