Installing onto a new IDE WDH 9 GB drive

[Adam Getchell <AdamG hrrm ucdavis edu>]

Hello all.

I'm having install difficulties with a new IDE WDH 9 GB drive.

The C/H/S information is 1232, 255, 63 according to Disk Druid. I've used
fdisk to write current partition information on the system, which is set for
a 15M /boot, 70M swap, and 4745M / . I don't plan on having any other
operating systems on this box. The rest of the drive I plan to format and
create a /home mount point, just to have the experience of moving files.

The error I get is can't mount filesystem, which seems to indicate something
went wrong with the formatting. I configured the install to format and check
bad blocks during setup.

Looking at the Large Disk mini-HowTo, it mentions the Linear mode argument
for the kernel, but looking through the installation menu I don't seem to
have reached a place where I can specify kernel options. Since I have a
/boot partition at the first 2 cylinders (minus the first 63 sectors, I
suppose) it doesn't seem like the >1024 cylinder problem should affect me. I
note the 8.4 GB problem, and I didn't know if it affected me or not, so I
just left about half the drive unformatted to get it under that limit, if it
applied.

I also checked the hardware compatibility list for IDE drives. I'm running
off the built-in IDE controller for an IWILL BD-100 motherboard, and the HCL
seems to say that built-in controllers are fine. There don't seem to be any
particular issues with new IDE drives, either.

I also tried using fdisk to change cylinder number to 1024 manually, write
the changes, and format my home directory up to that amount. That didn't
work either. I kept the number of partitions to 4, so I wouldn't have to
make extended ones.

Are there any suggestions? Or do I just need to trade in my hard drive for
one that works?

Thanks,

***************************	
*	Adam Getchell
*	AdamG hrrm ucdavis edu
*	System Administrator				(530) 752-1584
*	Human Resources Information Systems
http://hr.ucdavis.edu/
***************************	
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." -- Sun Tzu