On Mon, October 17, 2011 14:01, James B. Byrne wrote:

I am attempting to load CentOS-6 onto a ST31000524AS 1Tb SATA drive in a Supermicro 5015A-EHF-D525 system. The BIOS sees the drive and the CentOS install process sees and initializes it as well.

However, even when I accept the default partitioning, I get an error during the drive formatting prior to installing the OS. The error message is: "Could not commit to disk /dev/sda". I get this error whether the drive is configured as IDE or AHCI in BIOS.

On Mon Oct 17 14:12:26 EDT 2011, m.roth at 5-cent.us m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:

Have you tried putting the drive in another system and see if it's recognized correctly?

I have and the drive in question is formatted and CentOS-6 is successfully installed using the same media if I employ a different system to do the work.

Also, if you put the old drive back, does it work?

Yes, I can boot the Supermicro system from a previously formatted 500Gb disc that already has CentOS-6 installed on it. Further, if I install the 1Tb disk, now formatted and with CentOS installed courtesy of the other host, then the Supermicro system also boots from it.

What I'm looking for is whether you have a hardware problem, either m/b or drive... or controller card.

It does not appear to me to be hardware related, at least not directly. I suspect a bug in Anaconda. There are reports of a similar issue in Fedora last year and the bug was supposed to have been fixed in June of 2010, if indeed my problem is the same thing or something related.