Knackered Harddrive?

[MarkW7]

Hard drive partition problem

I bought a Maxtor harddrive months ago and have only got round to installing it yesterday, the problem i am having is when i boot into backtrack3 and use qtparted it shows a 7mb partition and i can't delete it no matter what, also using fdisk /dev/sda1 (normally hda1?) I can't make a new partition, primary or extended it says they're full; but it isn't!?

I did a boot and nuke on it last night which took 6 hours, re-installed windows and the same problem.

What i am looking to do is tripple boot, XP, Backtrack3 and Ubuntu. It is possible because i have done it before so i know how but it isn't playing ball.

Any ideas?

 

[richardbirks]

What is it saying when you install XP? Can you not just flatten all the partitions from the Windows installer?

Don't know where Backtrack3 fits into things, but for XP and Ubuntu I've always installed XP first and left some allocated space to install Ubuntu into later.

--
Richard

 

[MarkW7]

I can install XP without a problem, BT3 then goes second (Manual install via terminal) and then ubuntu last.
I have done it before so i know it is possible on a 40gb drive! So size isn't a problem.

I've just ran HDtune on all test and it says everything is good, + all green squares.

When i was using fdisk (partitioner tool) it said something about sectors. (I will check again later tonight or tomorrow), it's currently in this pc now formatting again ready for another go.