Hardrive overlap
 

The first time I tried to instal Linux (Mandrake), it said my harddrive overlapped. What does that mean? It said that sector #31953411 (3.3 GB) and sector #9976491 (10 GB) overlapped.

So, I went back to windows 2000 and found the partitions that it was probably referring to: DATABASE D: (10.4 GB) and OS E: (3.31 GB).

Also Note: partition E: after D: corresponds to the sector number of E: being after D:. D: is NTFS and E: is FAT32. And I'm a :newbie: !!

Is this a simple problem, fixable by software, or do I have to reformat the whole disk?

run fdisk, list the partition information for the drive, and note both the start and end blocks for each partition; make sure that they do not actually overlap.

I didn't run fdisk to see it, but my Ranish Partition Manager said the same thing, something about an error that these two partitions are overlapped. As the most ignorant detector, Windows displayed that all partitions are in well condition with correct space amounts. I never observed any wierd storage or space phenomenon before. I'm pretty certain it's true, although not knowing HOW they overlapped in the first place.

The overlapping probably also caused Partition Magic 7 to be unable to execute (a long time before this).

I'd have to do some research to back this up, but the issue of aligning partition boundaries on cylinder boundaries might come into play here. Well-behaved partitioning tools will place the start/end points of a partition on cylinder boundaries, and often complain if they detect partitions that aren't so aligned.

just a thought- I could easily be wrong...