Very weird it's not letting you fdisk. Have you tried just going mkesfs /dev/hda right off the bat to see if it'll do any damage?<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/20/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Rachel Garrett
</b> <<a href="mailto:rmgarrett@gmail.com">rmgarrett@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div>
I have a brain-tickled feeling that happens when I'm missing something obvious, but at the moment, I can't figure it out:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>1. There's an old computer that I have a Gentoo Live CD running in;</div>
<div> </div>
<div>2. I want to format the hard drive;</div>
<div> </div>
<div>3. At the livecd# prompt, as root, I say fdisk /dev/hda.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I get a warning message, </div>
<div>"You will not be able to write the partition table. </div>
<div>Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)</div>
<div>Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)"</div>
<div> </div>
<div>4. Then I tell it to create a new partition, accept the defaults, and say w to write out. It gives me an error, "Unable to write to /dev/hda."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Why won't the changes take even when I'm root and say to write them?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Thanks,</div><span class="sg">
<div> </div>
<div>Rachel</div>
<div> </div>
</span><br>_______________________________________________<br>Cialug mailing list<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:Cialug@cialug.org">Cialug@cialug.org</a><br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug" target="_blank">
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug</a><br><br></blockquote></div><br>