Hi

I just bought a new hard disk (western digital, 8mb cache, 160gb) and am trying to install Mandrake 10 Community on it, triple booting with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 pro.

My partitions are as follows (according to win2k's disk manager):
2gb fat32 (win98) active
30gb ntfs (win2k)
95gb extended partition, with a logical drive, unformatted.

I want to put Mandrake into part of the 95gig partition. Unfortunately, when i start setup, it fails with a message along the lines of: "I can't read the partition table, it's too corrupt for me :-(".

Windows 2000 and 98 both work fine. There's obviously a Microsoft bootloader installed to pick between the two working os's, if this is significant. Also, there's only one hard disk in my machine for now...

Any ideas?

Thanks
-rob

try a live distribution and run fdisk, if something is wrong in your partition the program will find it and then you can repair the problem. But first of all make a backup of the two partitons

There's issues with the partitioning tool with MK10 when trying to set up a dual boot - it wiped my partition table entirely. The workaround is to use a different distro (or version) to set up the partitions as needed by Linux, then quit that installation and start with MK10.

Apparently Mandrake 10 has an issue with scsi drives at installation time. I had the same problem and after unpluging an external usb cdwriter, everything worked fine. This problem doesn't appear anymore after installation.

As well, I get this from an other thread:

The Mandrake errata says:
Error scenario: Unable to read partition table (of /dev/hda) when a SCSI CD-ROM is on the system.
Why: The install boot sequence failes to create the SCSI devices under /dev.
Solution: When the installer reaches the point where the error message is displayed, press CTRL-ALT-F2 to go to a console and type at the prompt "mknod /dev/sr0 c 11 0" and then return to the GUI by pressing CTRL-ALT-F7. Select "no" to deleting the drive and the install process will loop back and work the second time.