Mandrake 9.1 is hanging

[raze]

Ok, I have done a bunch of successful installs on my dual boot/dual hard drive system. When I decided to trash the current install I had done to do a bit more of a "security hardened" system, something went horribly wrong. When I get to the partitioning portion of the install on hdb, I can choose erase entire disk, use existing partitions, or custom paritioning and things go down hill. The GUI shows up of both hd's and I make sure that I am on hdb, it goes...it writes the partitions and when it reaches choosing packages to install, the white box where all the listed packages should show up, just stays grey. It seems Mandrake just hangs there and the cd stops spinning. Has anyone had similiar? Maybe there is something wrong with the CD?

[mdwatts]

It could be related to any type of reason as you can see in some of the 'cannot install ??? distro' threads in this forum.

Do you have any other partitioning tools (Partition Magic etc.) that you could first use to delete those existing Linux partitions and then try the install again?

I've heard that GNU Parted (search the forums or http://freshmeat.net ) is quite good and also

http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/

[raze]

In fact I do have partition Magic. Maybe that will fix everything.

[m_hansford]

Be very careful with Partition Magic.

If you are using pre-version 8 (I've got Partition Magic 7) and have ext3 partitions (ie NOT ext2), Partition Magic will well and truly (ahem) FIX your HDD. Version 7 recognises the ext3 partition and figures it must be an ext2 gone bad and asks you if you want to fix a partition. Note that it only says you have a bad partition though.

I don't remember exactly what happened after that (it's all a fuzzy blur really) but I felt really sick.

What is it they say? "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."(?)

[mdwatts]

I always reply 'No' to anything Partition Magic wants to fix for me. That is the safest reply. :)