installin mandrake 8.2

if i may also add a point. the exactly same thing happened before my win partiton was trashed by pm. i thought i had a corrupt partition table.

but now i've completly removed all partitions and completely reinstalled the win system leavin 50% of the drive for mandrake.

tia

The partition table on the drive is trashed. The sanest solution is to backup anything that you want to keep, zap the drive, and start from scratch. With a partition table in that shape I wouldn't trust any of the partition tools to actually do the right thing when they tried to fix it.

yeesh, but that is exactly what i did, and still had the same problem. but when you say zap the drive, what is that exactly?

tia

By that I mean to either do a low level format of a SCSI drive or write nulls to all blocks on an IDE drive. The the former can be done via the SCSI BIOS on most controllers and the later can be done by booting a floppy or CD based linux (like from http://www.toms.net/rb/) and using dd to write nulls, something like:

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda

well, i dont fancy spendin all day re-installin my system again. so first i would like to try to repair the partition table first, cos, hey heck, if i trash it then i can try 'zappin' the drive.

so are there any partition table repaireres out there?

tia

A partition table in that state from an install could be a symptom of the bios and disk geometries not matching. Before doning anything else I'd want to make sure that I had the latest BIOS installed and that it was using the drive in LBA mode. Then you might try PartitionMagic or parted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/) to see if the partition table can be repaired.

well, partition magic reports the disk as ok and there don't seem to be any option to repair the partition table. and parted only works in linux, which of course i can't install.

before this problem the drive worked fine on this machine with the existin bios and bios settins for the drive.

tia

What OS was used before when it "worked fine"? If it was windows, that doesn't tell us much. Linux is much pickier about hardware working correctly and a mismatch between what the BIOS reports and what the actual drive geometry is will cause problems. Also, windows will tolerate one of the "BIOS drive managers" that compensate for a BIOS that doesn't understand large disks. Some of those drive managers don't coexist well with Linux.

Does you BIOS support LBA mode and is it enabled? Note that turning it on with some OS already installed will probably invalidate the existing OS.

well, i had it workin fine with mandrake and windows. dunno what i did to corrupt the table. but it became apparent when i tried to install 8.2. when i reboot next i'll check if lba is enabled.

tia

yersh, lba is enabled

tia

Well, if lba is enabled now it probably was when the disk was last partitioned. Changing from or to lba mode with an existing disk partition scheme could well result in the partition table looking strange, but that seems unlikely in this case.

Out of curiosity have you examined the partition table with a windows fdisk? You could make a bootable floppy from 95 or 98, dunno which you are using, and it should include fdisk. And when you looked at the partition table with PM did that also show the wierd data? If fdisk and PM both show sane data in the parition table, then I'd suspect that there's something about your hardware that MD 8.2 isn't happy with. The first thing I'd do in that case would be to check to see if the motherboard has the latest BIOS installed.

well, mandrake 8.1 installed fine, and i have 8.2 on my laptop workin fine. fdisk and pm both show 1 partition as fat 32 etc, the rest of the disk - the other half - is unallocated. i think that's the best way when installin mandrake.

all i am askin, is, is there a utility that will repair the partition table?

tia

To me the question is whether the partition table is actually messed up or not. Since both PM and fdisk seem to like it I'm inclined to believe that there's nothing wrong with the partition table and that the problem lies elsewhere.

Since MD 8.1 was perfectly happy and 8.2 isn't, one needs to consider what the difference between the two is. My guess is that you are seeing the later kernel & drivers on 8.2 just don't like the hardware it is being asked to run on. Frequently that can be the result of older BIOS, which is why I suggested that you check to see if you are running the latest BIOS on the Motherboard. And in extreme cases, when an older motherboard is involved, the only solution may be to replace the motherboard.

Another interesting test would be to see if RedHat 7.3 likes the current H/W setup. Both RH 7.3 & MD 8.2 are very similar w/regard to hardware requirements (not considering bugs) and if RedHat 7.3 fusses also that would tend to implicate the hardware.

yes, it seems that way. well it must be that way cos i upgraded my hd and i'm gettin the same problem. maybe it's cos the free space is pretty large, 20gb.

here is the error message...

<snip>

i cant read your parition table. its too currupted for me. i can try to go on blanking bad partitions (all data will be lost). the other solution is to disallow drakx to modify the partition table. (the error is partitions sector #1919950958 (259gb) and sector #538939391 (666gb) are overlapping!)

</snip>

as for my bios, it's up to date.

my machine...

k7 1ghz
128mb pc133
40gb win/linux
dvd
ati aiw 128
audiosense fm801 sound

is that enuf?

i'm gonna try to install mandrake 8.2 on my machine 2, which has the old drive on it.

tia

k, on my new machine - not this one - linux panics cos it cant mount root filesystem 01:03, vfs...

the new machine has a pc-chips socket a m810.

tia

k, it turned out to be the scsi jaz drive that caused the error, but gnevertheless, 8.2 gnever gave me the option to skip it.

tia