Does it matter what the partitioning is on the hard drive before the install? Fdisk doesn't like it when I try to write the partition table:
Re-reading the partition table failed. Still using the old kernel
umount the fatx partitions helps, but when I try to write the partition table, it ends with:
calling ioctl to re-read the partition table
and exits as if it finished. mke2fs doesn't work in either situations