Hi - I'm trying to install Gentoo for the first time, and I've actually managed to run into a snag before the install process has actually started. I put the Gentoo cd into the cdrom tray, start the box up, boot into the installation program, start that up with the gentoo kernel, get the networking going, and then get to the part where I'm supposed to partition off my hard drive...and that's where the problem starts. This particular hard drive has never had anything on it except for Mandrake Linux (which I've had my fill of). No DOS, no MS, nothing else. So when I type
fdisk /dev/hda I get the following message: "You will not be able to write the partition table. Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun SGI or OFS disk label. Building a new DOS disk label. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write one. After that, of course, previous content will be unrecoverable. Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w." At this point, all I am trying to do is to build the very basic partition table suggested in the installation directions, which is a 32 meg MBR, a 512 meg swap partition, and the rest as a root partition (definitely not my ultimate setup, but this is just a first run). No problem with the first partition, but then for the second partition, it says hit enter for the default start point of 33, and again for the default end point of 63. For the end point, however, I obviously want it to be +512M, which is what I tell it to do, and it tells me that is out of range. Can anyone help me with this hurdle? I'm not very familiar with hdparm...I tried using a couple of the options that showed up when I hit m, but couldn't seem to pull it off. Thanks! peace, Rog http://www.slammingrooves.com -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
