My first attempt ( alas Newbie as anything ) into Mandrake 6.5 installation has me reeling!

I had configured my desired choices of partitions, then saved them and then I"M ALERTED TO FIND OUT my partition table is corrupted ( to the best of my recollection! )

Upon reattempting to install, I'M AGAIN ALERTED TO FIND THAT MY PARTITION TABLE DOES NOT EXIST!
This is the error message:

" Fdisk error
An error occurred reading the partition table for the block device hda.The error was: No such file or device
"

Since I only have on drive, I can't even setup a file system or anything!

Have I wiped some data from my hardrive preventing the recognition of the partition table? Or have I screwed my disk?

My specs: ( i don't think I have any SCSI adapters )
HDD: Maxtor 40Gb 5400rpm
Mboard: ASUS A7A266-E K7DDR/SD
Monitor: 17" Acer 77c
Ram: 412 SDRAM pc133

Any help would be very philanthropic and greatly appreciated.
Chuck.

You might want to try a newer version of Mandrake. They are up to 8.1 right now. 40 gig harddrives weren't all to common when they released version 6.5 so I there might be having problems reading the complete harddrive.