hello! I have 4 partitions on my hard drive, one with Windows xp installed, an extended partition with a dos logical drive, unformated, 5 GB for linux, and another two FAT32 paritition. When I start the Mandrake 10 instalation, after I press enter and it starts detecting my usb and so on, when it says loading instalation into memory, it starts reportin errors on the kernel msg tab regarding blocks of the 3-rd partition, hdc. I have deleted it, and then it reported the same errors on the 4-th one hdd. After deleting that one too, it gave me the same errors, even though the partition didn't exist anymore.... After I press enter to install, there is nothing to do because I cannot interfere anymore with the instalation until the errors apear and then it tells me you can't recover from this, It's now safe to reboot.
I don't understand what is the cause of those errors and I don't know what to do... no one knows what to tell me...
Some good advice would be great...

First of all how many drives do you have? You have mentioned one.

According to your message Mandrake is adressing 2 drives, hdc and hdd?

Get that figured out 1st..

Cheers,

Gary

Yeah not only does your drive jumpering and ordering sound incorrect but Linux -MUST- boot the kernel from a PRIMARY partition.

Once the kernel is loaded it doesn't really care where the rest of the file systems are at if it can "See" them.

E.G.

You can place the kernel on

/boot <--- a PRIMARY partition

and the rest of the file systems on

/ <--- A logical parition on the Extended file system
/usr <--- Same as above.

In turn you are only permitted four primary partitions.

and that answers my question as well. thank you opjose

on another forum someone replyed me that the error I receive (I/O error on drive hdd, bad sector on block 339456..... and so on), means that it cannot read the secondary slave drive, which in my case is the cdrom drive, that means were I had iserted the instalation cd sa I figured out it means that the cd-s are not well burned.

Yes, but in addition things like DMA errors can also trigger similiar error messages.

E.G. if the settings are wrong for your drive or your drive is configured that DMA doesn't work, then you'll get these errors too.

However a bad burn or that your target drive is incompatible with the dvd or cd writer you are using, are the most likely.

If you have a fast connection, you can get the boot.iso image file (~8MB) from the Mandrake mirror of your choice in the images directory, burn it to CD (I suggest using a slow burn speed to improve chances of good burn), then do an ftp install.

You may need to know the URL and path to the mirror of your choice. An ftp installation takes some time since you have to wait for all the packages being installed to download, but then on the other hand, you have to wait for the .iso images to download as well. I did an ftp install for both Mandrakelinux 10.0 (Official) and Mandrakelinux 10.1 (Community) and they both went without a hitch.

The install process is the same as installing from CD with the exception you tell the boot CD to do an ftp install, connect using DHCP (leaving the fields for host, domain, or proxy empty - they are not needed in most cases) or you can specify a static IP address if needed, and provide the URL to the mirror of your choice.

HTH,