Hi,
I'm sorry, this is going to be long winded, but I want to include all relevant info. Also, although I am not exactly a newbie, I have very little command line experience (all of it bad, unfortunately). So, if your solution involves using the command line, please be very, very explicit with your instructions.

I am attempting to install onto a 200GB HDD which I have partitioned into many relatively small partitions using Acronis Disk Manager. Most of these are NTFS for WinXP, but three are ext3. I have SUSE 11.1 installed in one of the ext3 partitions, and the other two are empty.

When installing 2009, when I get to DrakX, I get the following error message: "I cannot read the partition table, it's too corrupted for me . I can try to go on, erasing over bad partitions (ALL DATA will be lost!) The other option is not to allow DrakX to modify the partition table. (the error is /proc/partitions does not agree DrakX 16 !=14 proc/partitions; sda1(sda) sda2(sda).....sda15(sda) Do you agree to lose all those partitions? Yes/No."

Of course, I said No.

I then get the following message: "The DrakX found the following solutions
sda3(10GB, /, ext3 (my Suse partition)
sda4(10GB, ext3 (empty)
sda7(10GB, ext3 (empty)

I have tried to mount 2009 in both sda4, and sda7 with the same result. DrakX formats the partition, but then I get the following error message:
an error occurred
mounting partition UUID=9C38DB8138DB58BA in directory /mnt/mnt/win_2 failed.

The only option I am offered, is to try again, which fails. After trying several times, I just gave up. HELP!

Cliff,
Thank you for your prompt, and useful help. I merged several partitions, and, all of a sudden, DrakX wasn't having problems with the partition table, and provided me with several options for loading Mandriva. Unfortunately, I was still unable to mount 2009. I got the same error message that I got above. Looking at that message, it now seems to me that DrakX is trying to mount 2009 onto a Windows partition, rather than the specified linux partition, for some reason. I'm going to browse the net, and look elsewhere to see if I can figure out why.

I suspect you have too many partitions on your drive. Here is a quote form a Red Hat document.

Here is a link to the entire document. -->http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...artitions.html

From what you have posted, it looks like you have 16 partitions. Is that correct?