Guest iseeu_3 Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 Hello, I'm trying to install mandrake 9.1 on my western digital 80gig hdd, i'm not going to dual boot with anyother os. everytime i try to install mandrake it gives me that error "formating of failed"!! I just installed win2k on this same hdd so i know the hdd isn't bad, it is in NTFS so maybe mandrake can't read it? i know mandrake 9.1 is suppossed to be able to resize NTFS file systems but it's not working with me!! any help would be appreciated! thanx in advance! <shad> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 Are these downloaded disks? If so, did you check the md5sums? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest iseeu_3 Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 no, i bought them from the mandrake site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest iseeu_3 Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 also, i just connected my hdd that i wanted to use for mandrake up as a slave again and successfully formatted the drive and made the drive fat32. windows even recognized it and then i tried to load mandrake on it and of course, IT DIDN'T WORK. it's great when you try and try and try to install something and it just doesn't work! oh it's great! PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!! <shad> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 Ok, when you are trying to install Mandrake on it are you sure the jumper is set right? If so, tell us, step by step what you do at the partitioning stage up to the error and try to state the error here exactly as it is on the screen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest iseeu_3 Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 alright, this is what i did the last time: I connected my empty hdd as a slave with my other hdd as the master and i went into pm 7.0 and told it i wanted the drive to be fat32 and it partitioned the drive as fat32. i turned off the computer and disconnected my main drive and just connected my empty drive and put the mandrake cd in the drive and rebooted the system. everything goes just fine until it comes to the partition part. it gave me some options and i chose "remove windows". it looked like it was going to work then it said "formatting of failed", that's all it said. i then went into the manual partitioning part and it didn't show the drive as fat32, it showed it as how i partitioned it the first time that i did, meaning, i partitioned the drive before all of this in ext2 format and made a swap and everything and errors occured when i was trying to load redhat 8.0 and the same errors in 9.0 as well. i know it sounds confusing but i've been trying everything i could think of! i also tried it like this: i installed win2k on this drive and then i immediately tried to install mandrake 9.1 and i get the same errors "formatting of failed" when i chose the option that mandrake does all the partitioning for you. so basically, i have tried all the options that mandrake gave me and all of them have given me the same error message, "formatting of failed". oh yeah, the jumper is fine, it's set to cs. thanx! <shad> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roland Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 hi, If you don't care the data already in the disk you can try this: - boot on the CD - type F1 for more options - type rescue - go to console - partition manually with fdisk roland Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 oh yeah, the jumper is fine, it's set to cs. I think this is the problem. Putting teh jumper on cableselect may work for windows and certain motherboard, but other OS / motherboard may not be able to detect it properly (I know of certain dell motherboards that have this kind of problem). Try putting one hd as master and the other one as slave by moving the jumper into the right setting (depending on what configuration you want). Then check whether mandrake can detect and format the harddrive properly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 Western Digital hard drives can be troublesome w/linux. I had issues with them in the past...my only suggestion is try it again. I eventually got one good install going and was off, but prior to that got a bunch of odd errors about the partitions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 cs - cable select- does not work with mandrake. You must set your drive to either master or slave. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted October 2, 2003 Report Share Posted October 2, 2003 Your mbr is probably corrupted. This can happen when you use a windows partitioning utility like PM after using a linux partitioning tool like in the mandrake installer. Linux and windows treat partition info differently and there can be problems when windows tries to write to the mbr after linux has and vice versa. It doesn't happen every time but it does happen. The easiest solution I've found is to download the manufacturer's disk utility from their website: http://support.wdc.com/download/ Get the DL Diagnostic which will auto install to a floppy when you click on it. Then boot off the floppy and zero fill the disk which will leave the drive in the same condition as when it left the factory by writng zeros to every sector, including the mbr. Leave the drive unpartitioned and do the partitioning in the mdk install. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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