On Tuesday 18 November 2003 06:57 am, Melissa Reese wrote:
> This time around, I got to the next step of choosing the drive (and
> many other options for partitioning), and again I stopped...just to be
> safe. There were two tabs ("hda" and "hdb"), and the second tab did
> look like the 20 GB drive I want to install Mandrake onto (it said "18
> GB", and Win98/Fat32, etc., which did describe pretty accurately my 20
> GB drive). However... The first tab ("hda") looked peculiar. It said
> "Empty", then "7.8 MB", and a couple other things which seemed to
> indicate that it wasn't recognizing my 80 GB drive. Why would the
> installation not see this properly?
I don't know what kind of computer you have but just a quick guess. Some of
the proprietary computers like Compaq, etc. often create a small partition on
the beginning of the primary hard drive and install extended BIOS, recovery
routines to that partition. The partition is usually some odd type of
partition, like a FAT 12bit partition or something of similar kind that is
unlikely to be written or accessed by normal Windows OS. If you remove the
partition, you suddenly find it is impossible to enter the BIOS setup routine
without downloading a couple of diskettes from Compaq. It is possible that
you have one of these extended BIOS partitions on the drive and Mandrake is
just noting that the partition is of a type that is not supported by the
kernel.
> Should I even worry about this if
> I'm quite sure of "hdb" being my 20 GB drive?
I wouldn't.
--
Bryan Phinney
Software Test Engineer
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
