Trouble installing 10.2 on new Toshiba laptop

[robsmith]

I just bought a Toshiba Satellite P205-S6267 laptop with Vista preinstalled.

I got Suse 10.2 on a DVD from Linux+ magazine.

I tried a straightforward install (the wildest I got was picking KDE rather than GNOME), but the partitioning step failed with error code -1012.

Looking around I found a semi-famous article by "Vista expert" Ed Bott on his own failure to install 10.2. He seems to have had exactly the same problem I had:

I booted from the Suse Linux DVD first. The system went straight into the installer, where I answered a few simple questions (time zone, language, and so on) and eventually got to the screen where it proposed what seemed like a sensible partitioning scheme. It recognized both drives, offered to create swap, system, and home partitions, and said it would resize an existing partition. I clicked OK and promptly received this error:

ERROR

Failure occurred during following action:
Setting type of partition /dev/hdf6 to 82

System error code was: -1012

That’s not good, is it? Googling every conceivable permutation of that error message turned up no useful information. When I rebooted to Windows, I saw that the partitioning

He concluded ultimately:

The culprit apparently, is the HPT370 card. I disabled it (and unfortunately lost access to 450GB of storage) and installed a PCI SATA card with a 200GB drive. After a few hiccups (still not smooth) and more than two hours, Suse 10.2 is nearly installed.

I don't have an HPT370 card, but this suggests to me that the problem is probably with the driver for my 160G Toshiba MK1237GSX ATA Device (hard disk).

I am guessing, but only guessing, that Suse 10.2 is using an inadequate device driver for this hard disk.

Does that sound right? If so, what can I do about it? I checked the Toshiba site. They don't have any new disk drivers for this laptop.

[oldcpu]

If the error is only a partitioning error, you could you a partitioning live CD, such as gparted or parted magic, to create a linux ext3 partition of a suitable size (say 20GBytes or so), and then try a re-install, ensuring that the SuSE-10.2 install goes on the ext3.

Please note that I don't know anything about vista, so I assume you have selected a vista partition format that can be carved up by a typical partitioning utility.

gparted can be found here:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

parted magic (a software fork of gparted)
http://www.partedmagic.com/