My Hard Drive Will Only Format Correctly W/mandrake

[HGeneAnthony]

I have a 200GB Western Digital hard drive. I have Windows XP partitions of 1 50GB NTFS, and 3 30GB FAT32. I've been using Mandrake for awhile now but frankly I don't want to because I think it's clunky and I don't care for their release schedule. In any case I've tried installing Fedora Core 3, Suse 9.1, and CentOS 3.3 on my drive trying to replace it. All these distros caused me to get an immediate blue screen of death on Windows bootup. In fact if I go into my Windows install CD it only shows 130GB unformatted. However if I install Mandrake 10.1 Community the installer will show all the Windows partitions and Windows will work. I've heard of issues with the 2.6 kernel but CentOS is based off the 2.4 kernel. On top of that even if I don't install a boot loader it'll act the same. In fact I wiped my drive clean with this command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=1 bs=512 && sync && echo done. I went into Partition Magic and was setting up the partitions again. I used their partition tool to create the linux partitions and I got the same damn error even though I just formatted the drive. I also used Gentoo to format the drive after booting the 2.4 kernel same damn thing. I put Mandrake 10.1 Community in and created and formatted the partitions went back into the Windows installer and all Windows partitions were available again. Why would Mandrake work and nothing else seems to?

[loft306]

ok did u use fdisk or cfdisk in linux ? try cf disk if u havent u can see all the info at the sametime on the screen all at once..... also try in linux shred it is the linux app for zeroing the hdd thease can both be used off of most live cd's