can't load or install mandriva

[fingal]

I would be very tempted to boot from a live CD (such as Slax or Knoppix) and try to look at your old SuSE partition from there. If there are any old files which you no longer need you might try deleting those. Just a thought. It's hard to pin down exactly what is wrong.

[ecrivain5]

Hi Fingal. I am pretty sure I have fond the problem. I have 2 drives. one 80gig IDE and one 200 gig sata. I think what has happened is that because I have installed about five different Linux products, they have each created a separate partition.
I have cleared the IDE drive by reformatting. Now I need to clear all the other non-windows partitions from the 200gig sata drive.
I know you are busy but I will be grateful if you can manage to tell me chapter and verse how to clear these other partitions which show like separate diskd.
I want to initially install PCLinux and I think I can do it from there.
I also, when the drive is suitable to install red hat linux so that I can compare the two systems and decide my preferred.
Bit long winded I am afraid but I would like to sort the drives out.
My thanks.
Brian

[fingal]

Hello - Yes that sounds like the problem. Any decent partition manager should be able to delete those extra partitions. I personally use diskdrake which becomes available when you attempt to install Mandriva. It can certainly delete partitions, but then it tends to ask you to install Mandriva. All well and good if that's the only thing you want to do.

You might consider using Parted Magic, which is a distro in its own right.

Partitioning (and getting your bootloader configured right) are often the first obstacles you need to overcome in the beginning.

[ecrivain5]

Doh... lost my windows last night Part of the learning curve i guess..not the first time in 20 years.
Thanks for the above...got the software to disk to install it. Cheers. Brian