I have a PC from year 2000 with AwardBIOS which now has a 160GB IDE primary master hard drive which I partitioned for use with Windows XP: 20GB primary + extended containing three logical partitions (60 + 20 + 20) leaving 40GB of unpartitioned space which I hoped to use for a Linux installation.

I am booting from a Debian 3.0r5 CD (updated today) which takes me as far as the screen offering to partition a hard disk which then sees my two IDE drives - the 160GB master and a 120GB slave (which is full of data). If I select the primary drive with the free space I get an immediate cfdisk fatal error - "bad primary partition 1 - partition ends after end-of-disk", although if I select the 120GB second drive I see the normal cfdisk screen showing one large partition and no free space.

I've seen some web pages on large disk issues with Linux, but it was my understanding that these were historical, and that everything was now easy with a post-1998 BIOS.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

David

What did you use to make your windows partitions? My guess is either cfdisk doesn't like your windows partition tool or your your bio's isn't set to lba