James Hatridge
I was given a used HD. The guy who gave it to me used a Norton program to write 0 and 1 all over the disk. He did this about 20 times (overkill I know, but it was his disk). Now the disk will not work. When I put it in my system the Bios can read the name and how large it is. But when I try to load Linux on it I get all kinds of errors. One error that jumped out at me was something about not being able to read the partition table.
I had a similar problem. The disk had a Solaris partition table and the SUSE Linux 9.1 installation also failed. The workaround was to write the changed partition table to disk and reboot since the running kernel couldn't "digest" the new table. Then the installation worked as expected. I don't remember if I used fdisk or the default partitioner to change and write the partition table. -- A.M.