Description of problem: Installing fedora core4 on 500 Gigbyte SATA hard disk fails at "formatting disk". Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: install core 4 on single 500 Gigbyte sata harddisk Steps to Reproduce: 1. install fedora on system with a 500 gigbyte sata harddisk. 2. 3. Actual results: Continually tries to "format" hard drive. Expected results: Additional info: tried this multiple times with various setups... Was unable to install fedora on 500 gigbyte harddrive, swapped out to a 120 gigByte (sata) drive to make sure I wasnt crazy, installed successfully, swapped back to 500 G drive then reinstalled winxp, everything fine there. Decided I'll just wait it out on the format seeing as how xp took 4 hours to format the harddrive (as expected). Waited 14 hours for fedora to format harddrive (went home from work, returned in morning), fedora reported still trying to format harddrive. tried various partitioning schemes including 1. auto partition ---> fail 2. manually partition ---> fail 3. manually partition only using 200 of the 500 Gigs of harddrive space ---> fail I only tried ext3 partitions. My theory is that there is something in the install/format script that is range limited to less than 500 Gigs of harddisk space on a single drive. I have built Terrabyte systems using redhat, but the multiple drives were 300 Gigs and lower and "raid"ed. Seeing as how 500 Gig drives are not yet common I would guess my theory above is valid, but who knows.
OK, after downloading tools from seagate to detect hard drive problems, 1 bagillion sectors appear to be bad on this particular drive. Therefore this bug report needs to be squashed.