I just purchased and setup a machine w/ the following: Athlon TBird 900Mhz Abit KT7-RAID motherboard (has ATA/100 support using the HotRob 100 Pro chip) IBM 30GB HD, ATA/100 (on the ATA/100 bus) Quantum Fireball 2.1GB EIDE (on the EIDE bus) The problem is that no matter which hard drive I try to partition, when I reboot my partition table is corrupt. I've used fdisk (Win98 and Win2k) and the one with Mandrake 7.1 - none of them work. I put the BIOS to failsafe settings and that didn't change a thing. Any ideas? I'm blaming the motherboard right now, but I'm not sure if I'm right to.

Michael, A similar problem happened to me yesterday. If you used LILO it should have saved a backup copy of the MBR in /boot (or /etc), named boot.NNNN. The number corresponds to the number of the device, e.g. hda is 0300, hda1 is 0301, sda is 0800, sda1 is 0801, etc. (I have a HDD similar to yours and it is device hde1 with NNNN=2101). You can restore the old boot sector with a command like: dd if=/boot/boot.2101 of=/dev/hde1 bs=512 count=1 (You need to be root to do this) Check the date of the boot.* files to find the latest one that was saved: ls -lsat boot.* I used the following command to dump the contents of the boot.* files to double check that they were not corrupted: od -s boot.2101 This will printout any text strings in the file. Sometimes a corrupted MBR might be saved in the boot.* files, and it may contain text strings such as "corrupted partition". Dumping the contents might be useful as a double check before you restore the MBR with the dd command. Good luck, Mike