murph1083

Im trying to partition my drives for my Gentoo install. When I type “fdisk /dev/hda” I get this:

You will not be able to write to the partition table.
Note: Sector size is 2048 (not 512)
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
Until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won’t be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Then when I hit “p” to list the table it says

Disk /dev/had: 50 MB, 50862080 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1 cylinder
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 2048 = 32901129 bytes

I am using a 80GB WD Hard Drive and a 60GB Maxtor drive with the WD as master and the Maxtor as slave. Both are IDE. Why is it saying my space is so small. Any ideas?

rcgreen

It looks like there's bogus information in the partition table
and fdisk is confused. Your hard drive manufacturer
probably has a utility that will zero out the table.
These utilities usually go by the (somewhat misleading)
name of "low level format". Only use the utility from
the disk manufacturer, not one from a different brand.

There is also a way you can zero out the partition table
from a running system, but the manufacturer's utility
is easy enough.