hard drive partitioning error

[lbthrice]

Wow I'm sure evryone is pumped to see another newbie posting an issue about a hard drive partioning debacle

here's my issue:

I am trying to install knoppix 4.0.2 onto my hard drive
i ran sudo knoppix-installer
hard drive rqmn'ts were not met
i HAD one big primary partition formated as an ntfs
i deleted it using qtparted and commited...
then i tried to create one big extended partition containing 4 logical drives...i marked the first as bootable

after committing i rebooted and now i am unable to access the /dev/hda using qtparted, cfdisk, or fdisk
critical error when trying to read the partition table with any of these programs....

have i rendered my hard drive useless??


if not...how can i start over??

[Harry Kuhman]

I doubt very much that your hard drive is useless, although that nasty ntfs partition may well be gone.

There is really no reason to use all of the drive for only an extended partition, I would certainly suggest creating some real partitions there and only making an exteded partition if you are going to run out of physical partitions, which you would not as you described things.

As to tools to use, they depend somewhat on what you plan to do with that hard disk. qtparted is a problem for many (I don't use it so can't really give advice on it). There are other partitioning tools that you could try, including the fdisk on Knoppix. Personally I wuld use Ranish from Windows or even a DOS floppy, but that's just because I like Ranish. And if the goal is to get Linux installed and bootable from the hard disk then I would just use the tools in the Etch hard disk network installer. If you are asking how to install Knoppix to this hard disk, sorry, that is a mistake that I don't help people make.

[Harry Kuhman]

Also, if you have an old bootable DOS floppy around you might try the fdisk on that. And you may need the special command fdisk /mbr to repair the master boot record. Beyond that I'm not clear on why fdisk in Knoppix can't see the hard disk, but be sure to try a complete power down and the reboot Knoppix, don't just try using fdisk in the same Knoppix session after using qtparted.