Hello Friends,
Yesterday i was installing Mandrake 7.2 on
AMDk7 - 750MHz, VIA- Chipset(Soyo Mother board)
128MB, Diamond Viper 200(32MB)AGP and 30GB Hard
Disk
I had 4 partitions on this Harddisk, is connected to primary
IDE (master), of the following size
1) Partition 1 = 6000GB
2) Partitoon 2 = 9000GB
3) Partition 3 = 6000GB
I had win98 and 2000 on these partitions.
In the forth partition, i had an suse linux installed(around 8 - 9 gb)
with swap, boot and root partition.
I started Mandrake 7.2 installation from the CD rom
and choose "Select existing partition". It showed
the existing linux partition(SuSe one). It asked to
continue with the formating of the Linux Native partition.
and resulted in error saying "unable to format and mount"
Then, i thought of changing the partition size,
i used advanced option,(DiskDrake - disk partitioner and
resizer), this showed the existing partition information on
the disk properly, and then i created partitions and selected
mount point for the /boot and /(root).
DiskDrake prompted, partition information is going to written
to disk, then i pressed ok. After that, it pooped a box saying
"Unable to read partition information, continue at your own risk"
then it displayed a blank disk with no partition. Actually it
screwed up my entire disk partition information by deleting
partition table.
Then i shutdown mandrake installation, and try to boot to win98.
i couldn't able too, bios din't reconginze booting device, then i
boot using 98 floppy and did fdisk on the harddisk,
i was really surprised, only two partition were there on the
disk, C: with 1MB and D with 4GB. and my entire hard
disk got wiped out and i couldn't able to recover the data.
Later i thought of partitioning harddisk using DiskDrake and
install mandrake. I created 3 FAT32 partition
of size 6000Gb, 6000GB,10000GB, and in the remaining(8GB)
i created swap, /boot and / linux partition, at this
time too, i faced few problems with DiskDrake, it used to
give error message saying "swap space need to be."(specifying exact
error message). Finally somehow, i could able to format
linux native partition and installation went through properly.
I selected boot loader to reside on MBR.
Then installation displayed "Installation completion" message,
told to reboot the system, by removing the media from the
CDRom. I did this, but system was unable to boot/find the
linux boot image.
No other way to go, i reinstalled the Linux, during this time also i
need to re-create partitions(i was getting same old error
messages) and however i managed to create boot disk this time
and told to install boot loader in the first sector of boot
partition and rebooted the system. Same thing, the system
din't recognized the linux loader, however i could
able to boot using boot disk which i had created during
installation.
Then i booted to win98, and did fdisk, surprisingly
i could able to see only two partition even though
i had created 3 FAT32 partition with DiskDrake.
Primary partition C: of 6GB(this is correct) and
Only one extended dos partition of 23GB D:
but i had created two extended partition of 6GB and 10 GB.
I need to know, why system is unable to load linux
on startup? what is the problem with linuxloader??
have you guys seen this kind of DiskDrake behavior???
is this DiskDrake is a buggy software???
Can mandrake guys answer my questions??
Thanks
Raj
