suse doesnt recognise partitions
 

hi!

I had xp and vista on the same drive and I removed vista..

When I try to install suse 10.2 it says that it can't recognize the disk partitions and the only option it gives is to format the entire disk...and I certainly don't want that!!!

Under XP, partition magic 8 doesn't recognize the partitions either! It says that it wasn't "able to find the drive letter to each partition" (error 117).

I tryed to create the Linux partitions with other software (under XP) but Linux still gives the same message!!

And I really don't want to format my windows partition!!

any help please?

thanks!
reguards, Rubber.

download a good live cd...I suggest knoppix

a live cd will load into ram and does NOT have to be installed.

knoppix and other good live cds have partition tools similar to PM which attempt to read your hard drive that is not running and read the partition table which has some info in the master boot record/

a gui tool is qtparted
a command tool is (linux) fdisk or cfdisk or sfdisk

write down those numbers (the sizes and the layout) and compare them to what you can remember what you did.

2) in the long run you may also want to have a backup of your system....the live cd has partimage on it....but I do not know how good it is with ntfs partitions.

3) if and only if....your recollection of the sizes and layout matches the live cd....can you then move on to re-deleting the vista partition and letting linux save the partition table again....which might then may it visible to xp....so reboot to xp and check


4) I cheat....I use a 4 primary partition table so it is super easy to backup the partition table of the mbr....partimage does the same if you take an image of the first partition....which as you know included the mbr.

let us know your thoughts on what the live cd says pls