[CLUE-Tech] SuSE 7.2 Error: "Unsupported partition table"

[Dave Hahn]

I haven't run into this on SuSE, but I have seen this problem.  I've
fixed it by:
1) Booting off a live file system CD.  I've used slackware with great
success.
2) run 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb count=512'
3) Reboot and repartition

The dd command overwrites the portion of the drive that contains the
partition table (/dev/hdb NOT /dev/hdb1) with zeros.  Giving you a nice,
certainly blank, partition table with which to work.


On Mon, 2002-01-07 at 21:08, BOF wrote:

    Hello,
    
    I have been trying to install SuSE 7.2 Pro on the second hard drive of a 
    system that I have had at least 175 of the 178 known Linux distributions 
    on. (Well, not that many, but certainly RH, Slack, Debian, among others).
    
    This 3.2 GB drive currently has Red Hat 7.2 on it, and was formatted as
    
        /dev/hdb1    swap      384 MB
        /dev/hdb2    ext2        rest of drive
    
    When I attempt to install SuSE, it does sees the existing partitions 
    during boot up, but then does not see them when it comes time to 
    partition the drive. I issued instructions to set it up as above, and 
    when it tries to begin installing software, the process fails with the 
    error message:
    
        "The disk has an unsupported partition table. Please repartition 
    disk /dev/hdb."
    
    I do not understand why it does not see the existing partitions, nor do 
    I know how to force it to see them. I've tried multiple ideas, including 
    using Tom's root/boot disk to run fdisk to wipe the partition table and 
    reset the partitions, but nothing that I do seems to work. Out of 
    desperation, I just did a fresh Red Hat installation, using Disk Druid 
    to establish the partitions. As soon as I got it to boot, I retried the 
    SuSE installation, and got the error message.
    
    Previous experience with this drive is that, once the partitions are 
    set, they are seen by any other Linux distribution when I install it, 
    and so I don't change them, other than to format them during 
    installation to wipe the old installation. This works for everything I 
    have tried except SuSE 7.2.
    
    Anyone have any ideas how to fix or overcome this?
    
    BOF
    
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