ask_before_blanking
 

New hard drive, 80Gb seagate.
Installed windoze me.
Tried to install Mandrake 8.2, wouldn't let me. Got as far as disk partitioning when it stopped with the following error

I can't read your partion table, it's too corrupt for me. I can try to go on blanking bad partitions (ALL DATA will be lost). The other solution is to disallow DrakX to modify the partion table (the error is ask_before_blanking: partitions sector (number) and sector (number) are overlapping (9Gb)

Resized the drive from windoze with partition magic, even reformated the extra space as e2fs.

I still can't get past disk partitioning in the installation.

I can go into rescue mode and fdisk the drive but it doesn't find a problem.

So, what is the problem and how do I get linux on my machine?
Cheers
Chris

Try leaving the space as free and unallocated with no filesystem at all and then install.

If you are feeling brave, then you could try booting from your Mandrake CD into 'rescue' mode (press F1 and then type rescue) and use fdisk or cfdisk to see what the problem might be. I believe that fdisk has an option to repair a bad partition table, but be warned, I have never used this option so I don't know if it actually reads the harddrive and figures out which partition starts/ends where and what filesystemtype it is, or if it just blanks it.

My mistake!
I have two hard drives.
It is the second one that is knackered, so I unplugged it, installed mandy to the primary, powered off, plugged the secondary back in and fixed it with diskdrake.