On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Yasha Karant wrote:
I booted a machine from the SL 6.1 install DVD to install upon an unformatted drive that appeared as /dev/sde. The drive is an advanced format Western Digital unit.The install failed at the partitioning format that I did as a custom format. Unfortunately, there was no way to capture the detailed message -- I tried scp but the local network security configuration prevented this from working. After the failure, I rebooted the machine and used fdisk /dev/sde to find out what I could. The result is: [root@jb344 ykarant]# fdisk /dev/sde The device presents a logical sector size that is smaller than the physical sector size. Aligning to a physical sector (or optimal I/O) size boundary is recommended, or performance may be impacted. WARNING: DOS-compatible mode is deprecated. It's strongly recommended to switch off the mode (command 'c') and change display units to sectors (command 'u'). Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sde: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000656df Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sde1 1 1275 10240000 83 Linux /dev/sde2 1275 103261 819200000 83 Linux One may note that the 4096 bytes that the disk internally uses is observed as a physical sector size, but there is an attempt to use a 512 byte logical sector size. I need to force the formatting to use a 4096 byte logical and physical sector size. I did use a custom partitioning during the failed install. Evidently, this cannot be done using the GUI installation from the installation DVD. Can I do it from my existing OS and then proceeding to install without modifying the partitions I would layout? Yasha Karant
Please read this http://karelzak.blogspot.com/2010/05/4096-byte-sector-hard-drives.html -connie sieh
