How to deal with "Partition table on device sda was unreadable"

[Henry S. Greenside]

I tried to upgrade my Thinkpad X61s today with a Fedora 8
64-bit distro on DVD. This laptop has been running Vista
Business and Fedora 7 for many months and I have had no
trouble installing Fedora in the past. 

But this time I have been stymied. When I tried to install
Fedora 8, I got as far as the screens that ask for language
and keyboard type, but then got this error message

   "The partition table on device sda was unreadable"

when I got to the pages related to setting up partitions,
followed by the option to destroy all partitions. (I don't
think so.)

Searching the Internet indicates this is a known bug 

 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c...

and the fix is evidently to type something like

    linux libata.ignore_hpa=1

at the boot prompt. I tried this as follows: when I got to
the Welcome screen (the very first screen of the F8 install
procedure), I hit the escape key, which brought me to a some
kind of shell window with a prompt. I then typed the above
line

    linux libata.ignore_hpa=1

but ran into the same problem, the partition table was
unreadable, so installation failed.

So I have two questions:

- What am I doing wrong? For example, am I supposed to give
  the command
 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c...
  to the prompt at some point during installation?

- Does anyone know how to work around this bug?

    Thanks,

    Henry

[Sean Madden]

Have you tried booting off the disk into 'Rescue' mode and accessing the 
partition table from there? 

-Sean

Henry S. Greenside wrote:
>  I tried to upgrade my Thinkpad X61s today with a Fedora 8
>  64-bit distro on DVD. This laptop has been running Vista
>  Business and Fedora 7 for many months and I have had no
>  trouble installing Fedora in the past. 
>
>  But this time I have been stymied. When I tried to install
>  Fedora 8, I got as far as the screens that ask for language
>  and keyboard type, but then got this error message
>
>     "The partition table on device sda was unreadable"
>
>  when I got to the pages related to setting up partitions,
>  followed by the option to destroy all partitions. (I don't
>  think so.)
>
>  Searching the Internet indicates this is a known bug 
>
>   
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c...
>
>  and the fix is evidently to type something like
>
>      linux libata.ignore_hpa=1
>
>  at the boot prompt. I tried this as follows: when I got to
>  the Welcome screen (the very first screen of the F8 install
>  procedure), I hit the escape key, which brought me to a some
>  kind of shell window with a prompt. I then typed the above
>  line
>
>      linux libata.ignore_hpa=1
>
>  but ran into the same problem, the partition table was
>  unreadable, so installation failed.
>
>  So I have two questions:
>
>  - What am I doing wrong? For example, am I supposed to give
>    the command
>   
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c...
>    to the prompt at some point during installation?
>
>  - Does anyone know how to work around this bug?
>
>      Thanks,
>
>      Henry
>
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