Hello All,

I'm having major issues with Mandrake 10. I've been trying to make autoinstall disks, and that part is horribly broken it seems. I finally did a ftp install last night, and made an autoinstall disk in the morning.

I rebooted and ran the autoinstall disk. It went for a while, downloaded the install program from the mirror, and then gave an error along the lines of "cannot write NTFS partition to HDA." That's not good I thought. I rebooted and chose Windows from the Lilo menu. It just sat there with a flashing cursor. I ran the Windows XP CD and went into its graphical disk partition software. It listed all my partitions, but it listed them all as empty. Everything was gone.

I tried reinstalling Windows, but after copying files and rebooting it gave me the "cannot load operating system error". I have spent all afternoon so far trying to fix this. It seems the mpr is corrupt, though I have not been able to verify this. The WD disk utility on their website reports no errors on the disk.

This is what I have done so far:
updated mother board bios: same error
ran fixmbr and fixboot from Windows XP Recovery Console: it says that it rewrote the MBR, but I still get the same error on reboot
changed drive settings from Auto to LBA: the error didn't show up, but a few random coloured characters just showed up on screen and the computer would not load anything

I am currently doing a quick low level format (00000 to the first and last million sectors of the drive) to see if that fixes it. If that fails and a full low level format fails I may need to get a new drive.

Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Thanks,

Tim

Hello again all,

It seems that the low level quick format did the trick. I am now able to install XP again. Does anyone have any experience with the autoinstall issues? Whatever I do I just can't get it to make a working disk off a cd install, and I only got a partially working disk off of an FTP install.

I've tried creating the disk both in the install and using "drakautoinst". I think I'm going to use VMWare for any additional testing.

Thanks,

Tim

Mandrake partition tools can be a little troublesome. It seems the methods you chose bring out the worst in them. Perhaps you should think of the install as a two step sort of thing. Step one is partitioning the drive. Step two is the install method. Why are you using an "autoinstall" disk? By that I mean, what is the objective?

Congrats, messing with partitions can be a pain.