In the course of experimenting with some Debian distros (and I hasten to point out that these distros did NOT cause my problem, I did that myself somehow), I rendered one of my three hard drives unable to accept an installation.

I then tried cfdisk as well as the partioning utility in Mandrake Control Panel, to see if I could manually partition the disk so it would accept files again, with no luck.

Then I read a tip, either here or (I think) somewhere else that I got through Google, that suggested using mkfs -t <filetype> <dev> to put a disk back into useful condition.

I ran mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdd1 (I prefer ext3 file system) and within ten seconds the disk was OK again.

Then I installed Mandrake 10.1 on it. Two days later I'm "back to normal" having installed what I normally have been using under Mdk 9.2, and fixing, with help from here and elsewhere, things that were changed because of the new kernel.

I wouldn't recommend doing this if you have indispensable data on the non-functioning disk, but since I was lucky enough to be able to sacrifice what was on it, I tried it and got my desired result.

Hello jonr

I just got to know what you did to cause the problem in the first place. As much I mess with this stuff it will happen to me.

Thanks in advance.

If I knew what I did for sure, I'd spell it out in detail, but I really don't know. I installed Libranet on a hard disk I wasn't using at the time, and then the Libranet installation got messed up when an apt update operation stalled after THREE HOURS of downloading and I had to cold-reboot the computer. Actually cold -START it, for it would no longer boot. Tried Libranet rescue routine and that didn't work either. Tried installing Mandrake on that drive and it appeared to install but then wouldn't boot. Tried to repartition the drive and Mandrake gave me a failure message, couldn't format.
Tried cfdisk and it appeared to work OK (I really shouldn't mess with cfdisk with my limited skill, though.) But it still wouldn't accept files.

So then I found the post that described what I talked about above (I booted into 9.2 on another drive to access the internet) and I got the unbootable disk working again. Installed 10.1 successfully and it worked much better than when I tried it a few weeks ago, so I just stayed with it.

My "philosophy" if you can call it that is that I might as well go ahead and experiment and take a chance on ruining things as long as I have my HOME FILES backed up. I had them on a third disk which I took GREAT CARE never to reference in all these goings-on. I was then able to transfer all my home files without a hitch once I got going again.

I even tried unplugging the power source to that drive to be absolutely sure it was safe but then it turned out the computer wouldn't even start up properly without it powered on. No doubt because my assignments are not the best in the world: I use slaves that ought to be masters, just because I was in a hurry when I originally put things together and have been too lazy to straighten things out afterward.

Oh, well. Moral: don't follow jonr's example.