On the off chance that someone else runs into the same situation...

On an old computer I use to play with various Linux distros, I formatted my hard drive (hdb) using QTParted from a live Linux CD, and ended up with a rather odd scheme:

[-hdb2 /home-][-------------hdb1 /-------------][hdb3 swap]

Not sure how that happened, but it did.

My favorite distro, Kanotix, didn't care, and neither did Knoppix, but SuSE 9.3 sure did. I told YaST to use the existing partitions, and just reformat them. After it got done installing from CD 1, it booted OK, but could not reload YaST to continue installing itself.

After the partitions were deleted and recreated (in the normal order - hdb1-hdb2-hdb3), it installed just fine.

The question isn't why did Suse not like it. The question is what monkey formatted that and are they using windows now?

H'mm, this board needs a kill filter. A bozo bin. A bit bucket. A /dev/null.

Or at least people who can read.