On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 16:12:48 +0200
James Hatridge
I was just trying to load 8.2 on to one of my systems. It gave me an error saying that the program "parted" could not change the HD. It said that it could load Linux, but change hda1's size etc.
Is this a problem with SuSE or is my HD about to go bad?
Was windows on that machine? I have seen alot of people, including myself, who seemed to have hard drives going bad, but it turned out to be file corruption caused by running windows, especially "defrag". I think windows tries to write some secret code to various spaces on the drive, and of course they don't consider you might be running linux, and it starts to mess up the linux filesystem. The best thing to do is boot with a cd or floppy, and completely overwrite the harddrive with zeros. Depending on your partition size etc.....you can make a simple script like mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/1 bs=8192 dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/2 bs=8192 dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/3 bs=8192 dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/4 bs=8192 dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/5 bs=8192 That should fill a 10 gig partition with zeros. Do it for all your partitions. Each file will stop at 2048 Megs, which is the file size limit. I just had a drive that was giving me "bad ide_ptr errors" and it seemed like a hard drive failure was imminent. Just for fun, I zeroed it out, and "low and behold" it works fine again. My error, I ran defrag on my windows partition. :-( -- I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.