Ok I have an 80gig HD and a 7 gig running mandrake 10. I just bought a new 160gig hd and tried to replace the 7 gig with it. Now when I boot my computer I get an invalid superblock error on dev/hdb1 (something like that). I tried to upgrade my installation via the mandrake cds but i'm getting this really annoying 'can't install important packages' when I know these cds are complete; I have used them before.

I'm assuming that linux is trying to mount whatever was on my 7 gig (which was empty but formatted) and doesn't know what to do when it sees my new empty 160gig. I really, really don't want to install Mandrake again for the 3rd time. Mainly since I put so much time installing and customizing everything. What can I do?

I'm far from a Linux expert, but maybe you should remove the reference to the 7 gig drive in your fstab config.

Or you could put the 7 gig drive back in where you had it, boot up and unmount the drive, then power off and change the drive. Mandrake will notice the new 160 drive on boot and allow you to mount it, part it, and format it.

You need to get the 7 gig drive unmounted to that MDK is not looking for it on start up.