i've tired installing mandrake and red hat and it seems to be having troubles reading my partition tables. i am running an amd duron chip......can anyone help me

hello,
sure we can - are nay linux partions already created?
are you uisng fdisk (the linux version) to create them?
what type of drive and where is its location (i.e which controller is it hooked up to and it is a master or slave) also, what version or mandrkae or redhat are you using?

I was trying to help Pacman83, so I can answer some of those questions.

We tried several distributions Madrake 8.1, Red Hat 7.2 & 7.1, Caldera 2.4.

He is trying to dual boot with Windows, so we want to preserve the data stored on the windows partition.

The Linux partitions aren't already made- so he only has one Fat32 partition. The current problem is that non of the installs read the current partition table and just try to display the recommended partitions when you go into advanced mode.

The drive is IDE and is a master - I don't know the make of the drive.

Can you boot Windows OK? I've found that when I buggar the partition table on my machine, Windows is the first thing to complain.

Mandrake's DiskDrake is not the best program to sort out broken partition tables: if it can't find one it'll tell you so, and then just go ahead as if the whole harddisk is blank. Whilst this does (normally) give you a nice new partition table, it does wipe all the information previously there.

If you can boot into Windows, and you can do a seriously good backup, why don't you let Mandrake sort out the partition table for you? Make the backup; make sure the backup works OK; boot the CD and when you get to the partitioning stage, do it manually. Create your Windows partitions (blue), create your Linux partitions (green + red) and install Linux. MAKE SURE YOU MAKE A BOOT FLOPPY, because when you install Windows, you'll need it!

Oh, BTW, if you've got a cd-burner, I would seriously suggest Norton Ghost...I know someone's gonna say that there are really good Linux equivalents, but they require that you already have Linux installed! NG can be run from a Windows boot floppy.