Guest tjfriese Posted July 20, 2004 Report Share Posted July 20, 2004 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tjfriese Posted July 20, 2004 Report Share Posted July 20, 2004 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted July 20, 2004 Report Share Posted July 20, 2004 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SwiftDeath Posted July 21, 2004 Report Share Posted July 21, 2004 Congrats, messing with partitions can be a pain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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