[Cialug] Booted Gentoo LiveCD - can't write to /dev/hda

[Tom Pohl]

Are you sure that /dev/hda is your hard drive?  I'll usually run  
dmesg and look for what was detected.  If your hard drive is scsi, it  
would probably be /dev/sda.

-Tom


On Oct 20, 2007, at 10:54 PM, Rachel Garrett wrote:

> I have a brain-tickled feeling that happens when I'm missing  
> something obvious, but at the moment, I can't figure it out:
>
> 1. There's an old computer that I have a Gentoo Live CD running in;
>
> 2. I want to format the hard drive;
>
> 3. At the livecd# prompt, as root, I say fdisk /dev/hda.
>
> I get a warning message,
> "You will not be able to write 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)"
>
> 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."
>
> Why won't the changes take even when I'm root and say to write them?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rachel
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug