Hello all. I am having a small problem i hope, with a installation of Antix-M8.5-486. I have a AMD-K6-2/522 with 384MB of ram and 2 20GB Hard drives. For some reason it will not format the drive. Both drives are in good condition, i use to have windows 98 on it, and i was able to format both drives with partition magic to EXT3. But ANTIX shows a Yellow exclamation point stating that the drives are unrecognizable. Not sure what else to do. I am not too familiar with linux command line yet.

Hello, you mean if you open Gparted (Applications>Tools>Gparted, I think) it gives that the filesystem is urecognizable? Even if it does so you may be able to format again (right click the partition and choose to format - make sure it's unmounted).
I'm just asking to make it more clear.

It will not let you right click to format. It tells me to create a partition table first. It gives me an option to format in like pc98, aix, msdos and so on. I have picked all of them and nothing happens when i click apply.

Is unmount a option in right click? if already unmounted. I would delete all premade partitions trhat were made before using AntiX gparted. I had a similiar problem once with wa warning triangle on a fat32 partition I made. I just deleted it and then after finishing operation. Right clicked on empty drive and select new. Label it as root"/".
Pick a file format like EXT2 or EXT3. Flag it as boot. All these things should be able to get done with right click on drive in gparted when drive is unmounted.

Good luck with it and happy trails, Rok

Hi brooklinzoo81. You will be able to format the drive.
First try Gparted>Refresh Devices (Ctrl+R) in Gparted's menu:
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If it doesn't make any difference, I'm really no expert but from what I have read you may have this problem because of the old Win98(DOS) formatting so you would have to do a real clean up on the drive (no problem since you want that).
fdisk is the tool that manipulates partition tables (to create the filesystems it's used mkfs, I think - which gparted uses). I'm a noob like you in this but fdisk's manual (man fdisk) says:

DOS 6.x WARNING
The DOS 6.x FORMAT command looks for some information in the first sec‐
tor of the data area of the partition, and treats this information as
more reliable than the information in the partition table. DOS FORMAT
expects DOS FDISK to clear the first 512 bytes of the data area of a
partition whenever a size change occurs. DOS FORMAT will look at this
extra information even if the /U flag is given -- we consider this a
bug in DOS FORMAT and DOS FDISK.

The bottom line is that if you use cfdisk or fdisk to change the size
of a DOS partition table entry, then you must also use dd to zero the
first 512 bytes of that partition before using DOS FORMAT to format the
partition. For example, if you were using cfdisk to make a DOS parti‐
tion table entry for /dev/sda1, then (after exiting fdisk or cfdisk and
rebooting Linux so that the partition table information is valid) you
would use the command"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1" to
zero the first 512 bytes of the partition.

BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL if you use the dd command, since a small typo can
make all of the data on your disk useless.

For best results, you should always use an OS-specific partition table
program. For example, you should make DOS partitions with the DOS
FDISK program and Linux partitions with the Linux fdisk or Linux cfdisk
program.

So run this command , shutdown, power up and run Gparted again.

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topic in Gparted's forum is related, the guy there had more problems than you but reading it may make you more familiar with the commands. Also you may like to have a look into man fdisk.

I have tired those commands and read those other forums. I am still having the same issue so far with both of these 20 gig hard drives. Not sure what else to do now at this point. Thanks to all for replying to my post so far.

Last stab in the dark. When in gparted. And you right click on the partition with the warning triangle. Is Check also a option available from the menu. If so use it. This also has worked for me when repairing partitions, especially fat32 ones.


I might also suggest downloading and burning a Parted Magic Live cd also. I keep one like a wrench in a tool box.
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When i right click on both drives everything is all grey out. I also have downoad Gparted live CD and tired that and it did pick up the drives and i was able to format them in ext3 format. When i reboot and put in the AntiX cd and ran the install it failed agian. It begins by setting up the swap partition then stops at 3% and fails. When i launch gparted again from the Antix CD it is all greyed out again with the yellow exclamation point. I will try this partedmagic later on tonight and see if this finally works out for me. Thanks again.

brooklinzoo81, this is looking not as a format problem but rather the installer.
While the machine seems to have enough resources something is not going well.
There's a thread at mepislovers.org about installing in RAM deprived machines at
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Not that this is your case but I would suggest that maybe you could open a topic there (in the antiX section), post the hardware specs (type inxi -F in a terminal in the live-cd) and describe your problems (like after you've formatted the drives and before running the installer does antiX's Gparted pick them?).
Also, do you have a RAID array? I've read that this may be troublesome with old machines. Maybe you could try (if you still have the will) unplugging one of the drives and see if it goes. Then if it does, try plugging it in again after the installation.
I suggested to post at Mepislovers because it has more members and some are quite knowledgeable.
In that thread I cited,
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has some tips to lessen the RAM usage for installation. But I'm inclined to think it's something else. Also in the end you can also count on Gparted's forum for clearing up some doubts.