320Gb hard drive with linux

[gooncorp]

Hi there folks. I'm currently having fun trying to get Linux to recognise a 320Gb hard drive I bought yesterday. So far, things have got steadily worse:
First of all, I tried partitioning the disk as one partition. Linux didn't like this - it just couldn't understand it.
We then partitioned it into 3 partitions of 100g and one of 30, but it was fine, but it didn't register when we rebooted the system.
Finally we tried wiping it completely so there were no partitions at all, and trie to boot to format it through the Knoppix installer. However, Knoppix couldn't open the disk as, allegedly, the first partition end code was in the last partial sector.
Hopefully, someone might be able to offer some help here. I'm currently downloading SwissKnife for XP to see if that will work when we connect it to an XP system, and get it all fixed there and fire it back onto Linux, working properly.

Thanks folks, sean

[gooncorp]

update - finally got it working after about ten hours of mucking about with it. I partitioned it with DSL and then ran mke2fs or something along those lines, which got it working with xubuntu. I'll write it up properly on my website and put a link to it here within a few days in case anyone else is facing a similar problem.

[PeOfEo]

First off, which distro are you trying to install? Unless you are doing Linux From Scratch or something, the distro can do the partitioning for you in the install process. Ubuntu, Sabayon, SuSE, even have graphical live cd installers that can handle all of that for you.

You aren't going to have one linux partition (you can but that can be messy and impractical), you are probably going to have 3. A boot, swap, and root.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?chap=4&part=1

Also, which boot loader are you planning on using? (Different distros use different ones by default, but of course you can use whatever one you want). Depending on if you use Grub or Lilo that is going to change your partitioning a little bit.

edit: I see you replied already, but I still have no idea why you would use another live cd to do the partitioning instead of just doing the partitioning in the install. I was also going to suggest Reiser4 because it's brutal.