Have you ever seen 80 GB free space in 15 GB hard disk drive? I have just seen in my very old hard drive. I would like to install Ubuntu 5.10 into this drive. Unfortunately, the process always hangs during formatting. I also tried to use only first 15 GB with no luck. My thought is there might be something wrong in the partition table and I have to clear them all. Fortunately, Ubuntu comes with lots of hard disk utilities such as fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk, parted, and hdparm.

First of all, I tried to see its cylinder, head, and sector recognized by BIOS and kernel. hdparm -i and hdparm -I shown that raw information and current information are different. Something wrong here. So I should make partition table with the correct information. parted and fdisk are not useful for this situation. Instead, I have to use cfdisk or sfdisk which allows me to override cylinder, head, and sector by the correct ones.

cfdisk:

cfdisk -c cylinders -h heads -s sectors /dev/hda

sfdisk:

sfdisk -C cylinders -H heads -S sectors /dev/hda

In some case, the partition table may be all corrupted and need to be clear. cfdisk can help you to start partitioning from zero state.

cfdisk -z /dev/hda

Good luck.

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