Jim Baxter wrote:
> Hi
> Thanks to those who told me how to add a drive to an existing system.
>
> We seem to have a problem with fdisk of /dev/sdb ( the new drive)
> Fdisk defaults to only 20 MB and will not save anything we do to the drive.
> It is a Seagate st34573w 4+gig SCSI.
>
> Fdisk gets errors about unknown partition table type when we write and exit.
>
> I can not find disk druid on the system to try to use it. We normally use it
> when building a new system and I thought it might work.
>
> Any help would be much appreciated since I need this extra space real bad.
>
This may or may not help you, so please analyze the story carefully before you
engage in this practice.
I have a really neat trick that I use when I get weird results from a hard
drive, while using fdisk.
Generally, if something bad happened to the partition table, then the disk
becomes quite difficult to write new partition tables.
I used to have this problem with an old IDE drive, each time I did an fdisk on
it, it would not allow me to do anything to /dev/hda, but would allow me to
write partition tables to /dev/hda1. (That is really really weird) Getting
fdisk to save was also a problem. I have no idea how this happened, but my
largest suspicion is the crummy Microsoft fdisk utility that I was dumb enough
to use.
Microsoft's fdisk utility was equally grumpy when repartitioning.
So what I figured I needed to do was to get rid of everything on the drive, the
partition table, the fat, the everything. Since I don't know of any format
utility that allows you to write straight to the raw device (/dev/hda instead
of /dev/hda1), I learned how to use dd to do the trick.
If we were to write zeros to the hard drive from block 1 to block n, the
partition table would be gone, and we could start from scratch.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
or in your case
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
WARNING:
Everything, I mean EVERYTHING on that hard drive will be blastified, gone.
kablooey. Partitions will be erased. If you have anything useful, get it off
of that hard drive before doing this.
After doing the dd, you can use the linux fdisk or disk druid to set up
partitions.
Since this is a new drive, it might be a useful trick for you.
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