Believe it or not but I've had this happen three times to me but I could
not repeat the circumstances in which it occurred. I acted hastily twice
and lost all my data however the 3rd time I went straight to Fdisk as
you did tried to create a partition and it said that there already was a
partition whereas the boot disk came up with the same answer as it did
in your occasion. It seamed that going through the process of the fdisk
seemed to be enough to refresh whatever holds the partition mapping and
all boot well when I backed out of it. I was using win98 and trying to
install Md at the time, but not into the windows partition. It hasen't
happened since either.
Since then I've always maintained a separate data partition in Fat32
that windows and Mandrake can share. Ie found it to be a good safety net
when you are playing with multiple operating systems.
And as the other response said, I aslway choose the Mandrake install
option where I can use DiskDrake to visually see what it has done or
chosen to do.
Nev Cobb
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Ok, this is what happened...
>
> I was running Windows, and bought Linux-Mandrake 7.2.
> I installed it with the custom option, as i had already installed 7.1 a
> couple of times. when it got to the point to decide how to install it on my
> harddrive, i chose the option "install to free space on Windows", which i
> thought would create the necessary partitions, and 'steal' the space from
> windows. Beforehand i had defragmented windows.
> when i clicked into the "install to free space on Windows" option, the
> system froze.(AI could move the mouse, but the system would not respond to the
> mouse or the keyboard navigation of the options... I proceeded to press
> <ctrl><alt><del>.
> the system rebooted, but instead of booting normally it asked for me to
> enter the location of my command.com file, i entred c:\windows\command.com but
> to no avail. When i booted with my win 98 boot disc it told me that it had
> not found a valid FAT16 or FAT32 partition on my drive, and that i should
> use fdisk to make one. i used fdisk and it told me that there was the windows
> partition (i could tell because of the size), but that it was a non-DOS
> partition. I tried using norton disc doctor, but that didn't help because it
> could not see a drive to examine...
> I desperately need help, because i've got important stuff on the windows
> partition...
> I started Lnx-mdk 7.2 setup again, just to see what the partitions looked
> like etc. but the 'only' option of how to install was to use all the space
> (ie. no option to use the space that was not being used by windows - win does
> not use all the space on my harddrive; the rest is empty)
> I know this is not exactly a linux question, but my guess is that some of
> you will also know something about windows.
>
> Thanx a lot...
>
> creaktop
>
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