[newbie] MD 10 install misreads HD

[Josh]

I've recently installed MD10 community on three seperate PC's, but ran 
into a pretty major problem during two of the installs.  When installing 
Mandrake and creating partitions, Mandrake misread the HD geometry and 
basically destroyed the partiton table.  Lilo wouldnt boot, and would 
either print a single L to the screen, or a string of 9's.  Luckily I 
had a knoppix CD lying around, so I was able to get into an operating 
system and try to diagnose the problem.  One of the programs (I believe 
it was parted) I tried while in knoppix told me that the operating 
system was mis-reporting the disc geometry and the drive was being 
reported as 500MB.  I found that pretty funny, cause that particular pc 
has a 120GB drive in it.  While i was able to rectify the problem and 
re-create the partitions while in knoppix, its not a fun thing to see 
happen.  If I hadn't done a backup a few weeks prior to that, i would 
have been screwed.
The second install I did went fine, because I used pre-existing ext3 
partitions, so the install didnt touch the partition table.
However, the third install did the same thing as the first.  This was on 
a seperate pc, diffrent sized HD, with a new set of the first 3 discs in 
the community edition.
Even though i've worked through the problems, I'm still trying to figure 
out what happened.  There are a couple of people in work that are 
curious about linux, and I want to recommend and give them the mandrake 
cd's, but they'll be dual booting windows and I'm not going to give them 
something that may destroy their existing partitions.
I've searched the mandrake forums, and checked the twiki real quick, but 
havent found any info.  If anyone does know anything about this, i'de 
appreciate some help.

thanks
Josh
btw, all of the cd's i've downloaded passed the md5 checks, just in case 
anyone is wondering -=P

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