On 12/16/2010 09:10 AM, Drew wrote: >> fdisk /dev/sde >> >> Hit p to see the list of partitions. Press d to delete a partition. Press n for a new partition. > Or you can just use t to change the filesystem type. > Your disk has a gpt partition on it. Was it previously installed on an Apple Mac computer? You can of coarse use GPT partitions on any computer, but because of the immaturity of the gpt partitioning utilities, they can be more troublesome (though supposedly everyone is moving toward gpt because of support for larger disks). (I wonder if Dells Perc controllers use GPT partitions? - I don't know...) parted tries to be more intelligent by reading the content on the disk and determining what kind of filesystem is on partition. If you really know what your doing and don't have other existing data on the disk, you could zero out the old partition table and/or the content of existing old partitions and you'll probably have fewer partitioning problems. (You can't use fdisk with GPT partitions). To zero out just the GPT partition table and first several sectors of the disk, use something like dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=8 of /dev/dev/sdX You can also zero out single partitions on the disk, or the beginnings of partitions. Otherwise leave out the count and zero the whole disk or whole partition. Nataraj