I've just spent all day today trying to install KnoppMyth R5A16 on my freshly assembled (blank) box with no success. Having been around Linux for years and setup and administered lots of boxes before I really didn't think it would be such a big deal, but I've run into a quirk (apparently) in the 2.6 kernel that has me stumped.

I can't seem to get this thing to write the partition sizes I want. Neither fdisk nor cfdisk work properly. I setup the table inside the tool, write it to the disk, and when I read it back later the values are different. I've tried blanking out the MBR (dd if=/dev/zero ...), manually specifying the drive geometry on the boot line (knoppmyth hda=C,H,S) as well as on the fdisk/cfdisk command line and STILL something is modifying the values I enter.

The reason I think it's a kernel 2.6 thing is I can boot from a different live CD that uses 2.4 (like DSL) and there I can build partition tables all day long with no mystery.

Can someone clue me in here?

EDIT:
OK after enough searching I found this which lead to this, and this recipe which works for me:

1) clear the disk. I used the quick low level form of the Maxtor PowerMax utility but there are other ways;
2) Establish a partition table with some industry standard utility. I used FDISK on a Win98SE system boot floppy;
3) boot the KnoppMyth CD, run "fdisk -l" and note the CHS it reads from the partition table;
4) reboot the KnoppMyth CD, but at the boot prompt enter the CHS parameters you found in the previous step, ie:

where C=17120,H=255,S=55.
5) proceed with installation. For me I still had to do a manual install, but at least cfdisk and fdisk didn't stomp on each other.