On November 26, 2002 07:50 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi Charlie, > Thanks for your help. I followed your instructions. Unfortunately i got > stuck after choosing Expert installation where after which it couldn't read > my partitions properly. u might want to refer to my mail t stephen for a > full explanation. > > Sean <snip>
Howdy Sean; Maybe 'cause I forgot to tell you to click "Done" after setting the partitions and you went straight to the next step without rewriting the existing partition table? I'm sorry, my bad! I've read the replies; including your partition layout posted to Stephen, as well as the answers from Stephen and Brian. The "8 GB (1024 cylinder) limit" doesn't affect your situation since Linux overcame that limitation some time back. It doesn't exist any more and isn't of any consequence. It seems the entire issue may have started with not being willing; or being unable, to give up data that hasn't been backed up, by reformatting and reinstalling both operating systems fresh, and aborting repartitioning at an early stage. Along with too many third party partitioning tools. Fdisk, Power Quest's Partition Magic, diskdrake, XP installer and so on. Is it any wonder the result is unreadable? The message you've been getting from the Mandrake installer means your partition table is so corrupt that it is unusable as it is. Following the suggestions presented by others (and my own) would mean losing whatever data is on the drive, but that seems unavoidable now. There are probably ways to rescue it; or at least some of it, but they all cost serious coin. Booting to the "command prompt only" from a DOS boot disk (Win 9x) and running /FDISK MBR, then deleting all partitions via low level format and starting fresh is possibly all you can do now. Brian's suggestion about "zeroing the disk" with a (Fujitsu? Is it part of their *major* recall?) utility disk is all about what some people refer to as a "deep" or "low level" format. Total erasure is the gist of it. I've had to do that recently with an old (3 years) 13 GB Maxtor in a friend's machine, but the option was in her machine's BIOS. Didn't need the utility disk. It takes a while, and the end result is a disk with absolutely _nothing_ usable written on it that any method (possibly) short of a scanning/tunneling electron microscope could find. As has been said by others; I see that you're getting frustrated, but please don't give up on the list's help and especially on yourself. You're getting good advice and suggestions from other list members, so I'll just step out of this and leave you all to it. 'Too many chefs spoil the broth' and so on. Just don't forget to back-up data in the future. There's a lot to be said for totally clean starts, and back-ups will let you do that without chasing bytes you need in the future. Best of luck Sean. Regards; -- Charlie Edmonton,AB,Canada Registered user 244963 at http://counter.li.org The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. -- Blaise Pascal
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