Something to think about ...

[mairving]

I am trying to figure out what caused a problem with a Linux install.

Here are the system specs:
AMD Duron 750
Asus A7V MB
SB Live Card
Pinnacle Firewire card
GeForce MX 2 Video Card
512MB RAM (2-256MB generic)
Samsung DVD 12X
Aopen 12X Burner
IBM HD 45GB
IBM HD 20GB

All right here is the scoop. I decided to put Mandrake 8.0 on the 20GB (ATA100 slave with 45GB master). The master has W2K on it. The install went mostly without a hitch. Towards the end it bombed out with a bad memory error. Well I am going to replace that with some Crucial soon. I then did the install again and everything installed fine. I couldn't get X-windows to load but didn't really try that much. So then I decided just to check to see if Windows was still accessible. Well it turned out it wasn't. I tried the repair from the W2K setup but that didn't work. So my next thing was to put in a Windows 98 bootdisk and fdisk /mbr . Well that worked. Of course, lilo was gone. But when W2K loaded up it spent an hour verifying files. It was almost like a drive letter had changed and it couldn't find the files it was trying to load. When I looked in Disk Management, it showed the Linux partitioned drive as blank space but no partitions had changed. It also appeared that some files were corrupt. Well since so many things appeared to be toasted, I went ahead and formatted my drive and reinstalled W2K. Which turned out to be pretty good since my Firewire scanner works now and it didn't before.

To make a long story short (too late by now), does anyone have any ideas about this one? I will end up in the next day or so trying again but kind of curious on this one. I am really curious as to why W2K recognizes the drive as unpartitioned space. When I have installed in the past it just would recognize the drive at all.