I just bought and installed a new Western Digital hard drive in my Mythtv box. It's supposed to be a 400GB SATA drive. I connected it to the second SATA connection on the motherboard of my Dell PowerEdge SC420.

# fdisk /dev/sdb

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 1043 MB, 1043202048 bytes
96 heads, 56 sectors/track, 379 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 5376 * 512 = 2752512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 379 1018724 b W95 FAT32

I'm guessing that the W95 FAT32 is a leftover of some sort of vendor testing of the drive, but 1043MB is definitely wrong. Do I need to manually configure the drive size somehow before partitioning it?

I'd say so.

You can use the information from the when the bios detected the drive, or the info printed on the disk itself. fdisk will let you set any of these parameters (type x for experts then m for the menu). You probably won't have to reboot, since the drive isn't currently in use.

Mike

If your motherboard is SATA capable, I'm surprised the size isn't auto detected. If the actual size of the drive isn't detected properly in a modern system, I would not trust the drive....

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!