[jrbuergel]

With a fresh install of Mandriva 09, it deleted the partition table of only the external drive, (I checked it with the GParted live CD tool), the whole drive showed as all unallocated space. So then I used that Test Disk tool to attempt to rebuild the table data, which only partially worked. That external 250 GB drive had 10 partitions with Fedora 9 installed on the first 2, then Mandriva, the swap, and a ntfs storage, were all partitions with higher numbers in the extended area, and which I was not able to recover. So how could this really occur, are Microsoft software employees during their off work hours secretly volunteering their evil programming skills in the open source software community, and editing the code to cause damage this way, to attack Linux, or is this just a conspiracy theory?

[lotuseclat79]

Hi jrbuergel,

Before doing the fresh install of Mandriva 09, did you prepare a new partition for it, or make any assumptions about where it would be installed? Did you consult Mandriva 09 Installation Guide(lines) at the Mandriva website? Or, at least try to find such guidelines?

A good set of guidelines to follow in the future is from member saikee's links in his signature where he has a model for many multiple partitions of Linux and other OSes - setting up, etc. See: A simple Howto for installing and booting 145 operating systems in a PC, and the other links in saikee's signature at the end of the post.

Since you were doing a fresh install of Mandriva 09, I doubt what you experienced has anything to do with M$ code - I would never give them that much credit for all the crappy software they have produced (OTOH, the Singularity OS project is focued on making a new OS completely independent of Windows code, and at least someone in M$ is doing the right thing for the future to save their bacon!).

-- Tom

[jrbuergel]

I just installed the 09 version onto the same partition as my older Mandriva 08 and shrunk the swap file down. I did not read any install guides, but I have some previous installs. Does it have an effect since my computer has a add in type SATA controller PCI card, which it can be used for either internal or external connections, (by setting jumpers) ? I do notice that when the external drive is on and connected eSATA, that it becomes dev/sda, but when not then the internal drive is now sda. Thanks for some help.