From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: The kernel does not recognize the drive. This problem occours during installation (partitioning with DiskDruid or fdisk is impossible because the kernel has nothing to partion). The problem has to do with the kernel version an the disks firmware (see below). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. try to install RedHat 8.0 on the drive from CD/Floppy 2. Installation aborts when you try to partition the disk 3. -> Kernel sees wrong geometry with 0 cylinders (size of the drive could not be determined). Actual Results: abort of installation (anaconda wants to reboot) Additional info: The drives firmware falsely tells the kernel it is capable of LBA 48 adressing. That is wrong. The kernel tries to send some LBA 48 commands and the drive errors. Kernel versions <2.4.18 worked ok. Disk geometry is reported with 0 cylinders due to wrong drive size recognition. Specifying geometry at the boot prompt does not help. "nodma" does not help. There was a patch posted by James Finnie (jf1.uk) on newsgroup lucky.linux.kernel (17th October 2002)
what controller is the disk connected to ?
The drive is connected to the onboard IDE controler (connected as primary master). The Board is an ASUS P2B-S with an Intel BX440 chipset.
Created attachment 85549 [details] The kernel patch from James Finnie
Such a change for an apparently faulty device is much much too risky for a production grade operating system. If someone takes such a fix properly though the 2.5 development tree so it gets broad testing then it might be something to look at but not currently. Closing as NOTABUG, since the problem seems to be the drive firmware. Perhaps Seagate have fixed firmware by now?