I've been trying to get Mandrake 7.0 installed for a couple of days now,
but I keep coming up against an odd problem. I recently upgraded my system
with a 30 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM drive, and moved my old 13 GB Maxtor into the
2nd drive position. I've been trying to put Mandrake on that 2nd drive,
but when I run the install program DrakX only ever seems to think the drive
is 2014 megabytes (while it recognizes that drive 1 is 30 gig just fine).
Oddly, if I partition the drive it'll recognize the size of the partitions
while still saying the drive is only 2 gig... that is, however, only if the
partitions are primary partitions--I tried, using Partition Magic, making
an extended partition and setting up Linux-related logical partitions, but
DrakX says, "I can't read your partition table, it's too corrupted for me.
:(" I finally just made 4 primary partitions (one for Windows at the upper
range of the drive), an 11 meg /boot, a 126 meg swap, and a 7+ gig /
partition (at least, that's what I named them in Partition Magic, and DrakX
seemed happy enough with them... although it still thought the drive itself
was just 2 gig). However, I can't seem to make any of them bootable (even
though they're low on the drive), although that could well be my lack of
understanding of Lilo (and, to throw into the mix, I've got BootMagic
installed too, on Drive 1--I thought it would be able to recognize Linux,
but it doesn't do so automatically, and when I try to force it to look to
one of the partitions I set up, it just stops on boot).
So right now I'm stuck using a boot disk, and for some reason that's a
*very* slow way of getting up and running. I'd obviously like to get this
all set up so I could boot from the HD; even better, I'd like to figure out
why DrakX isn't recognizing the size of my drive. (Note: last year I
installed RedHat 5.2 on this system, only at that time the 13 gig drive was
drive #1, and I put Linux on a set of partitions on an 8 gig drive; I had
none of this trouble then on basically the same hardware--although I do now
have 256 meg of RAM and a new video card. However, I don't believe this is
a Mandrake-specific problem, as I also tried that old Red Hat last night,
and Disk Druid and Fdisk on that package seemed to have the same or similar
problems.)
Any help would be appreciated!
Scott Udell
