Hard Disk Format Prolbem

[winglee]

Dear Sir,

When I install TinyCore 3.0, I face Hard Disk Format Problem.

When I type cfdisk /dev/hda, a error message was showed.

"FATAL ERROR :Bad Primary Partition 1 Partition ends in the final partial cylinder."

Please teach me how to solve.

Thanks.

[TaoTePuh]

I have read that this is a special problem of cfdisk. Have you ever tried a different partition editor, e.g. fdisk or GParted?

[curaga]

Existing partition(s) are invalid; start with "cfdisk -z" to have a clean slate.

[beerstein]

Hi: For partitioning purpuses I always use Gparted or PartitionMagic.
You my use a live CD and start Gparted from that liveCD.
The GUI allows you to play around and see what is working

regards
beerstein

[tinypoodle]

I met the same recently on a disk which had not been user partitioned (a single NTFS partition).
fdisk and sfdisk did not have such an issue with the disk.
After shrinking the existing partition (losslessly) and creating 3 new partitions with gparted, the cfdisk issue had gone away. gparted initially showed unallocated space of 1 MB at start of disk which disappeared after partitioning.
Speculating that doing a most minor modification with gparted just to cause it to rewrite the partition table might do the job.
If you do not wish to repartition, testdisk might possibly help (I haven't tried).

[winglee]

Dear Sir,

Thanks for all people helping.

The harddisk was installed peppermint ice before.

Is there any help for solving the problem?

Thanks.

[tinypoodle]

Do you want to retain anything on that disk or just wipe it all and start anew?

What exactly of all approaches in replies is not clear to you? Ask more specifically?

[winglee]

Dear Sir,

i want to erase all informations in Hard Disk and start a new.

Thanks.

[tinypoodle]

What I would recommend then even in general would be to zero it out first, that can't harm.
Not sure if that will fix the issue with cfdisk or not, you just have to see; if not, you can then still follow curaga's approach.

Code: [Select]

sudo cat /dev/zero > /dev/XdX

where XdX is the device of disk, e.g. hda, sda; make sure you get that right.

[maro]

Hmm, I'm not quite sure that posting a possibly quite "dangerous" command as in reply #8 is such a good idea. As far as i can tell it would lead to the "destruction" of all hard disk partitions (and not just the one targeted one).

I just hope that it's not meant to be "practical joke" like the one a co-worker of mine ones tried by suggesting to a new sysadmin to "solve" a problem with sudo rm -rf /

[tinypoodle]

Agreed -and I guess same is valid for reply #2, but OP was explicitely asked and explicitely replied wanting to wipe all data from disk.  

[maro]

Yeah, but there is a difference between "all partitions of one disk" and "all partitions of all disks". And I'm afraid your command does the latter.

[tinypoodle]

where *d* is the device of disk, e.g. hda, sda; make sure you get that right.

If there is any convincing proposal to formulate that better, I am ready to modify post 

[tinypoodle]

edited. any better now?

Difference in consequences in case of a thoughtless copy and paste.

And for the case of wanting only to zero out one partition:

Code: [Select]

sudo cat /dev/zero > /dev/XdXN

e.g. for XdXN = hda3

[maro]

Thanks for making that change. Please don't get me wrong it's just too easy to copy & paste commands and some people might not be aware of the consequences.