Hi Stephen,

I saw the exactly the same problem with a SL305 install onto an old 
laptop and eventually concluded that the hard disk had become faulty.

Regards,

Will

On Sat, 17 Mar 2007, Stephen J. Gowdy wrote:

> Hi All,
>   	Sorry for the off topic question but thought I might get an answer
> quicker here. I'm trying to install RHEL5 on a machine (currently running
> RHEL3) it has trouble reading the partition table somehow. I can read it fine
> with fdisk after pushing ALT-F2 to get the shell up. Is there a limit in the
> number of partitions anaconda understands? Here is the partition table;
> 
> Disk /dev/hde: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>
>      Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hde1   *         1        33    265041   83  Linux
> /dev/hde2            34      4865  38813040    5  Extended
> /dev/hde5          1107      4865  30194136   83  Linux
> /dev/hde6           845      1106   2104515   83  Linux
> /dev/hde7            34       582   4409779+  83  Linux
> /dev/hde8           583       713   1052226   83  Linux
> /dev/hde9           714       844   1052226   82  Linux swap
> 
> Originally it was out of order but I fixed that and it still has the problem.
> The message starts "partition table on device hda was unreadable" (this device
> is hda during the installation), it wants you to create a new partition table.
> I'd rather not as I want to keep some partitions after the reinstall.
> Any ideas?
>
>   						regards,
>
>   						Stephen.
> 
> --
> /------------------------------------+-------------------------\
> | Stephen J. Gowdy, SLAC               | CERN     Office: 32-2-A22|
> | http: //www.slac.stanford.edu/~gowdy/ | CH-1211 Geneva 23        |
> | http: //calendar.yahoo.com/gowdy      | Switzerland              |
> | EMail: [log in to unmask]       | Tel: +41 22 767 5840     |
> \------------------------------------+-------------------------/
> 
> 
>

____________________________________

William H. Bell

Telephone (+44/0) 141 330 2338 
Fax.      (+44/0) 141 330 5881

Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Glasgow
Glasgow 
G12 8QQ
Scotland

____________________________________