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

[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-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c5d1aaf3415d9713f
>
> 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-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c5d1aaf3415d9713f
>   to the prompt at some point during installation?
>
> - Does anyone know how to work around this bug?
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     Henry
>
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