Hi,

I'm attempting to install RH 9 on a P500 machine with 256megs of memory. The drive, a Maxtor 80gig, is brand new. However, there are a couple of issues:

1) I get the following error message:

"The partition table on /dev/had is inconsistent. There are many reasons why this might be the case. Often, the reason is that Linux detected the BIOS geometry incorrectly. However, this does not appear to be the case here. It is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders, and may cause problems with FAT file systems. Using LBA is recommended."

2) The install continues for a bit but then bombs "Swap space not initialized"

I've checked a # of forums and the issue may be "geometry" related. Some have talked about booting with certain parameters but either don't specify the exact ones or a way to find out what they are.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Have you considered that your BIOS does not support such large hard disks?? Does the BIOS detect the hard disk properly??

Qex beat me to it. That is mostlikely the case. try a smaller hdd and see if you can get any farther. Something around 10 or 20 gigs.

When you installed, did you allow the distro to automatically create partitions for you?

Did you create a /boot partition in the first some-odd sectors of the hdd?
You may also check that as well. I only say it because the swap space also fails to initialize. Was the swap space created either?

Good Luck!

Thanks for all the replies.

1) I let RH do the partitioning for me.

2) I checked with the manufacturer and the motherboard is capable of handling 80 gig (with a BIOS upgrade, which I did).

3) I've been doing some more digging and there are parameters I can use during the install to specify the "geometry" of the disk. However, so far none of the articles I've found has been very descriptive.

Any other ideas?

Thanks again for the help.

Install redhat again...
use disk druid to partition

add a /boot partition of about 100mb or so

unless you want a particular scheme
make a / with almost all the rest except

make a swap partition with about double memory size

Im a linux newbie trying to install with win 98 get that 'the partition table on /dev/hda is inconsistent' error ignore it then when it comes to the partitioning it says it cant allocate it as primary partition then i have no root one either
PS sorry if my msg is a bit confusing/badly written
.

Hello all.
I'm also new to Linux, and am trying to intall RedHat 9 on a PIII 450 with a WDD600 (60GB) HD. When Druid comes up, it only says I have 32GB of free space to partition.
The BIOS has no probs with the drive. DOS Fdisk sees it all, so I can't imagine what Druid won't.
Thanks