HD installation problems...

["Brad" <newbie capstone net au>]

I still haven't resolved my HD installation problems after 4 days of trying
to get it going so I'll re-post the original message in the hope that
someone else has overcome this.

I have a 20Gb IDE Seagate HD that I am having a lot of trouble installing
RedHat 6.2 on. It is an ATA-66 HD but I am only using it in UDMA33 mode with
a 40 wire cable. The drive's native configuration is  39693 tracks x 16
heads x 63 sectors and I have invoked LBA mode in the BIOS so it is now 2490
cylinders x 255 heads x 63 sectors  I have formatted it with Win95 with one
large partition and there are no bad sectors.

When I start the RedHat installation and get to Disk Druid I set:

/    1004Mb
/usr    18324Mb
/swp    203Mb

I then start the installation and when it goes to format hda6 (/usr) it
comes up with an error:

Error mounting hda6: Invalid argument

Exception error
Traceback (innermost last)
File "/usr/bin/anaconda" , line 342 in ?
initf.run (todo, test = test)
File "/usr/bin/anaconda/text.py" ,
line 1165, in run
rc=apply (setp[1] (), step [2])
File "/usr/bin/anaconda/text.py" ,
line 782, in _call_
if todo.doInstall ():
File "/usr/bin/anaconda/text.py" ,
line 1114, in doInstall
self.fstab.savePartitions
File "/usr/bin/anaconda/text.py" ,
line 149 in savePartitions
self ddruid.save ()
SystemError: Error partitioning drive
/tmp/hda: Invalid argument


It seems to be having some difficulty accessing the drive and I am guessing
that the drive geometry may be unsuitable for Linux.  I am aware of the 1024
cylinder maximum for '/' and I would have thought that as '/' is only a
small number it would be well within the 1024 cylinder limitation. I have
created 2 x 8Gb and 1 x 2.3Gb partitions instead of the one large one and it
appears to work OK. I have also installed the HD into a different PC with
different motherboard etc and it is still the same.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Regards,
Brad