I cannot format partitions
 

I need some help. I'm trying to install red hat 7.2 (its the distro I have on CDs) and the install hangs formatting the partitions. The install doesn't seem to have any trouble finding my hardware and I choose the defaults for a workstation install. I'm installing on a brand new hard drive so I've been letting the install create whatever partitions it wants to. It does recognise the hard drive and create the partitions, but it won't complete the format and the installer doesn't really indicate how far it has progressed.

The machine is home built using an old M-tech M668 motherboard that has 2 333mhz pentium IIs with 512 meg of ram. This board supports udma33 drives and the hard disk I'm trying to use is a new maxtor udma133. Could this be the problem? Could a udma133 interface card be used or could the drive be forced to use 33 mode?

Thanks in advance for your help.

try this
 

I have an even older computer and loaded 7.2 on it with no trouble. My guess is that you have remnants of some other files system on the drive. I would recomend partition magic or if you don't feel like doing that download the latest version of Redhat (9.0) when it loads it gives you the option of removing all partitions on the drive. It worked like a champ. just for kicks and giggles I took a drive that had a NTFS with NT 4.0 , Fat32 with 98 and Linux mandrake 9.0 on it and loaded RH 9.0 on the drive. I checked remove all partitions and it wiped it clean. You're in the Atlanta area if you want me to I'll mail you the RH 9.0 disks. I downloaded the iso files yesterday and loaded it on my drive.
Another option is to use disk druid ... but it's not the route I would use.:tisk:

How large is the hard drive? Does the format include a disk check? Is it really hanging or is the check on a large drive taking a long time?
Just a thought.
Good Luck.

Wow, thanks for the replies.
The drive is a brand new 30 gig ultra/133 from maxtor. Certainly the first time I tried there were no other partitions on it and the install gives me the option of removing all partitions and gives me the ol' "are you really sure you want to do that" message. I have not chosen the disk check option (and the force LBA32 option, whatever that is, doesn't seem to make a difference) so I don't believe that a disk check is taking place. I have left the thing for hours and days with the formatting filesystem progress bar displayed. It very quickly reveals the first segment of the progress bar and stays there. Most times, but not always, the mouse pointer is frozen and all I can do is shut it off. How long should a format of a 30 gig drive take? By the way, the same thing happens with mandrake.
I just thought of something, the board has built in SCSI but I don't have any devices on the bus. If I disable the SCSI adapter in CMOS then the install still tries to load the driver and seems to have trouble with that, so I have just left the adapter enabled. One would hope that that wouldn't have an effect on formatting an IDE drive, but ...

Thanks

If this is the first install on this hardware, you may want to check that all hardware is set up correctly.
Hard drive jumpers?
Cable in correct spot?
Perhaps run the manufactuerers drive check utility?
Does the system boot with a Windows or Linux boot disk. (Toms?)
Confirming system boots and runs anything shows basic stuff probably correct.
A you using fdisk correctly during install?
Does a check at the Red Hat website support show anything related to your install?
Just some suggestions. The SCSI could also be a problem. If all else seems OK you may want to investigate further.

Re: try this
 

I make the mistake of picking one time to say something when a bunch of incidents make me say it - straw on camel's back thing - so this isn't directed at you personally but I swear this board is overrun with salesmen from PowerQuest. You do not need to pay 30 bucks for proprietary software when parted, c/fdisk, mke2fs, etc., etc. will take care of everything but NTFS partitions.

As far as your problem, if I understood that right, if your drive and buses don't match there can be problems, as you suspect. And, if it's a new drive, it could simply be defective. I like 2damncommon's stuff. Check the basics and try alternatives to narrow down the range of possibilities. I think 75% of problems boil down to cords being unplugged or typos or the like. *g* Or like a case of mine - I bought a replacement floppy drive and I could tell it simply didn't *work* - took it back and made the guy give me another and it worked fine.

You say a 30 gig Maxtor? I'm in the middle of recompiling my kernel and there's something about some Award Bios/32 gig Maxtors needing jumpon.exe and auto-geometry resizing support enabled in the kernel to "stroke" it to boot. You're not having boot problems and probably nothing else applies but maybe it is some situation with your BIOS and disk geometry. Anyway - the docs suggest checking out the Maxtor site, so maybe that'd have something for you. I have a whopping 812 meg Whothehellknows in the box I'm working on now, so it's not a problem for me but I thought about your post when I read that. Try downloading a boot/recovery disk with a different kernel and see if you can format it with that, maybe.