gecko79

I have two issues here both pertaining to Suse 9.0. First one is I was doing a fresh install. I went to remove a partition and now it shows a 20GB HD only has 512MB even in the BIOS. I tried loading Red Hat to use Fdisk and Disk Druid which I've used many times successfully. No luck, drive still reads 512MB.

Other issue, removed previous hard drive and installed spare 6GB. Once again tried to install Suse 9.0. No problems partitioning or anything like that this time. Only problem is it froze part way into disk 2 install during Mozilla 1.4 module installation. I thought maybe it was just taking longer than expected but the status indicator stayed frozen for over an hour, at which point I did a hard reset because it wouldn't respond to Abort Installation or anything else. Now even the BIOS can't even detect a hard drive period. I'm a Suse newbie but my best guess is that for whatever reason it locked up and fried the hard drive. Does anyone have any other words of wisdom for this situation? Any help or ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.

batty_professor

Hi, and welcome to TSF. I'm sorry to hear you're having such problems installing Suse. I don't however believe there's any permanent damage. Have you tried loading the bios defaults and save and exit? I would expect that to make the system manageable again. I believe your real problem is a hardware conflict, whether your motherboard or other I don't know until you give some more information on your hardware.

gecko79

I've tried loading the Bios defaults then I tried optimal settings and neither work. It's a second computer of mine...just an AMD K6 2 500 Via chipset, 384MB Ram. I eventually wanted to scrap Windows but I'm not having the best of luck so far. Which drive are you referring to? ..the one not even detected or the one that shows only a fraction of the 20GB normally avail? I plugged the 20GB one back in and tried reboot, did the normal boot seq (which now displays 1057MB as the disk size) then displayed GRUB at the bottom follow by _ and then just froze so I'm thinking the freeze on install jacked that one up or something. Do you need any other specs other than what I described above? Thx.

batty_professor

I was expecting the default settings to enable you to at least detect the drive properly. Does the drive share a cable with a CD Rom? What other hardware devices are present, network card, sound?

gecko79

Cable goes straight from drive to board. Have D-Link DWL-G520 wireless card in PCI but that's pretty much it.

batty_professor

I hate to say it, but perhaps a different Distro might be worth a try. Seems like I had a similar issue with Fedora at one time. I have pretty good luck with Mandrake, and it's what I have the most experience with. I'm not however to be taken as the last word on the subject.

gecko79

I've already tried RH7 and 9. I'm thinking it's just simply a hardware issue but I don't have a clue how to fix it now.

Skie

Have you checked the settings for the hard drive within the BIOS? You should be able to tell the BIOS how many heads, cylinders and sectors the hard drive has. This info can be found on the label that's on the hard drive itself. Make sure that these values are correct. If these are wrong, then you'll have problems with any OS. If the BIOS is set for auto detect, then change this to user input and set those values. See if this makes a difference.

gecko79

There seem to be 2 places where the info is editable. The first is the CMOS set up where it lists the hard disks (of which there is only one). The hard drive specs are Cyl 1046 Heads 16 Sec 63. They seem to be correct within but there are other fields that are editable. In CMOS this is what I see
Hard Disks Type Size Cyl Head Precomp Landz Sector Mode
Prim Mast User 539M 1046 16 65535 1045 63 Auto

Mode is changeable to Normal, Large, LBA which affects all of the above numbers except Size. Obviously the drive is bigger than 539M but that part isn't editable.


Another section that is related is called IDE HDD Auto Detection but it just asks you to select the Primary. No options to edit. The Integrated Peripherals section has the following IDE HDD Block Mode: Enabled, IDE Primary Master PIO: Auto, IDE Primary Master UDMA:Auto.
eeekk!?

batty_professor

I would suggest selecting the "load setup defaults" in the cmos, integrated per., etc. where they are available. When you do auto detect of the hard drive, it should give you choices of 1,2,or 3. selecting the 1,2,or 3 and pressing Y will get you the settings as indicated. There may also be a note at the bottom pertaining to unix and using large or LBA, to have proper detection. If you can get it to show no drive and auto in the main page it should do a detect on boot.

gecko79

The load defaults don't work. I tried that a long time ago.

batty_professor

Ok, you've convinced me bios is not the issue. I know I've had a similar situation at some time or another. Believe I resorted to the DOS utility fdisk. Used fdisk to remove partitions, restarted and checked to make sure the partitions were gone, had to do numerous times though in order to get rid of all. Once you're convinced the partitions are gone, then create a partition, entire disk, see results. If this doesn't get it, put the drive in a different computer.and try again I think I had to resort to that too. You can straighten this out, the drives aren't bad, just corrupted.

batty_professor

I think I remember what started the problem for me was a bad CD copy. If the installer offers to check the media for you next time, do so.

Skie

You listed these numbers:
Cyl 1046 Heads 16 Sec 63

Are these exactly as they are printed on the hard drive itself? You'll probably need to take the drive out of the computer to check this. If these values are different, enter the correct values into your BIOS/CMOS. These 3 values are what tell the computer how big a drive is. This is why the size value is uneditable.

Another question is, how old is this computer? If this computer is fairly old, it may not be able to recognize larger hard drives. In which case, you would need to download the latest BIOS update and install that.

gecko79

It can recognize larger hard drives with no problem. I've had a 40GB in it before. The numbers I gave earlier (Cyl 1046 Heads 16 Sec 63) are the same ones that are printed on the drive label itself. The PRECOMP and LANDZ columns are editable but the size of course isn't. So I'm wondering if those have something to do with it.

batty_professor

Any drive that is labeled as 16 heads and 63 sect figures out by the math to have roughly 1/2 the M.B. as the number of cylinders. So 512 M.B is correct for the drive in question here. But to my understanding you thought this drive was a 20 Gig?

I'm sorry I didn't pick up on the numbers earlier.

Skie

According to this website, http://www.csgnetwork.com/mediasizecalc.html, and based on the numbers you provided, plus assuming that there are 512bytes per sector, your hard drive is only 539MB. Just type the numbers and and it'll give you the result. Can you give me the make and model of the hard drive and I'll look it up to see what it should be.