installing on a hdb with win
 

I have 2 HD's, the first one i use only for WIN (40gig, hda). This was my original HD.
The second is partially formated to work with WIN ( total is 160GIG, 60GIG to WIN, 100GIG to UNIX, hdb).
The unformated part is the slot (100GIG) that i want to use for Mandrake9.1/10.

Now when i go through the partitioning part of the installation i get the following error: "An error occured dos formatting of hdb1 failed".

Now hdb1 is the part that is allocated to WIN. I do not wish to touch that but the installation program is insisting that i do so and throws an error.

Is there a way i can avoid this?

Thank you.

have you tried to manually set partitions and then do an install ?
If not, I would try that.

I indeed tried, manually setting the partitions. Unfortunately that did not work.
I have two hunches that:
1) UNIX tries to partition the beginning of the second HD where WIN is located (at the BEGINING of the second HD). I could try setting the WIN partition to the end of the HD, that might make Mandrake happy.

2) The problem has something to do with my original booting disk, hda.

If any1 has any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated.