My Hard Drive Will Only Format Correctly W/mandrake
 

I have a 200GB Western Digital hard drive. I have Windows XP partitions of 1 50GB NTFS, and 3 30GB FAT32. I've been using Mandrake for awhile now but frankly I don't want to because I think it's clunky and I don't care for their release schedule. In any case I've tried installing Fedora Core 3, Suse 9.1, and CentOS 3.3 on my drive trying to replace it. All these distros caused me to get an immediate blue screen of death on Windows bootup. In fact if I go into my Windows install CD it only shows 130GB unformatted. However if I install Mandrake 10.1 Community the installer will show all the Windows partitions and Windows will work. I've heard of issues with the 2.6 kernel but CentOS is based off the 2.4 kernel. On top of that even if I don't install a boot loader it'll act the same. In fact I wiped my drive clean with this command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=1 bs=512 && sync && echo done. I went into Partition Magic and was setting up the partitions again. I used their partition tool to create the linux partitions and I got the same damn error even though I just formatted the drive. I also used Gentoo to format the drive after booting the 2.4 kernel same damn thing. I put Mandrake 10.1 Community in and created and formatted the partitions went back into the Windows installer and all Windows partitions were available again. Why would Mandrake work and nothing else seems to?

I belive that it actually was a GRUB problem, not a 2.6 kernel problem. I'm not using Windows but if I remember correctly you have to change the hard drive mode in your BIOS from CHS to LBA (or vice versa) to get it to boot. It's possible Mandrake has applied a workaround that is perhaps removed when you remove Mandrake (and as a result, probably replace the boot loader). Try going into your BIOS Setup and toggling your hard drive mode from CHS to LBA or vice versa.

Also, what does the blue screen in Windows say?

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It say UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. I also generally pick LILO over GRUB. But I've done both. Besides don't forget I formatted in Partition Magic with the same error without even installing anything. My BIOS, for the hard drive, has Type Auto with LBA Mode: Supported, Block Mode: 16 Sectors, PIO Mode: Mode 4, Ultra DMA: Mode 5, Cable Detected 80 Conductor. It also has 200GB as maximum capacity. I can change the type to User which allows me to change the LBA/Large Mode to Auto or Disabled, Block Mode to Auto or Disabled, PIO Mode to Auto or 0-4, DMA Mode to Auto or a list of other selections (don't feel like typing out unless needed), or S.M.A.R.T. to Auto, Enabled, or Disabled. What do you think?

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I should also mention that even though I get the BSOD if I format the partitions in Partition Magic without anything else as soon as I delete the Linux partitions Windows will boot.

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I figured out the problem. I tried a lot of partition schemes to see what worked and what didn't. My original scheme had:

C: NTFS 50B Primary
Extended
D: FAT32 30GB Logical
E: FAT32 30GB Logical
F: FAT32 30GB Logical
G: Linux Swap 1GB Primary
H: Linux Ext32 15GB Primary

This would crash the system. If I changed it to:

C: NTFS 50B Primary
D: Linux Swap 1GB Primary
E: Linux Ext32 15GB Primary
Extended
F: FAT32 30GB Logical
G: FAT32 30GB Logical
H: FAT32 30GB Logical

It worked. I know Extended counts as a primary partition and you are allowed 4 but I thought any other primaries needed to come before it in the table but with Primary, Logical, Primary it still seemed to work though. It's only with the first partition that I had issues. In case your wondering why I used 3 30GB FAT32 partitions it's so I had read/write access to them under Windows.