Raju Krishnappa wrote:
>
> 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
See bug #1148 at the following link....
https://qa.mandrakesoft.com/dimension/cgi-bin/index.cgi
