[butcher]

Hi

I think I really screwed up here. I was given a used hard disk that I'm sure was in good working order, and installed it in my old computer to set it up as a Linux box to learn on. I answered the first few questions of the Red Hat installation and decided to cancel it untill I could upgrade the ram and video card. I then started to run the compaq restore disks I have so I could do the upgrades I wanted to when the restore said it had an error and I had to cancel out of it. Now I have no usable OS on the disk at all, so I started the Red Hat installation again. Now I get an error during the Red Hat installation that says

An error occured reading the partition table for the block device hda. The error was

Partition(s) do not end on cylinder boundry.

This occures because the drive geometry detected by the kernel used by the installer is different than the drive geometry used when the drive was partitoned. This can be corrected by specifying the drive geometry on the kernel command line when booting the installer.

If this makes sense to anybody, I would greatly appreciate it if they could make it make sense to me. I'm new to Linux so please be gentle with your expination.

Thanks!
~Butcher~

[M.Hirsch]

you might have your harddisk setup wrong in cmos setup.

if not, you should not bother.
this is not really an error but a warning message that something COULD be wrong. it does not really matter and redhat should continue installing. are you using a very old redhat version?

it should go away too if you delete all partitions in linux fdisk. (best start with a NEW partition table). but beware - if you had data on this drive, it will be lost.

[NoXcuz]

I think that the 'error' will follow your installation of Redhat unless you fix it. Your kernel will use whatever information is collected during install, and since that appears to be faulty, it will continue using that after the installation has finished. Which means that the system probably won't use the entire disk.
As M.Hirsch says, check your cmos (BIOS) and see if the harddrive setup matches the actual harddrive. Probably has something to do with the 'magical' 1024 cylinder boundry...
Check the number of heads, sectors and cylinders. I'm guessing that the number of cylinders exceeds 1024, but during setup, it only sees (can use) 1024 of them, and thus the error.
If your cmos settings are OK, you should just wipe the disk with fdisk or disk druid, and the problem should be gone.

Otherways you could start the installation with typing something like (instead of just hitting enter)
linux hda=<cylinders>,<heads>,<sectors>
eg.
linux hda=1244,255,63

If you don't fix this, you'll need to start your redhat with this every time you boot it, in order for your system to use the entire disk. Or you could add it to your lilo.conf.
Ie, add a line like
append = "hda=1244,255,63"
and run /sbin/lilo to install it.

//NoXcuz