MINT won't play with 2 partitons

[maprx]

My lap top has 2 main parts drive c: and drive f: it is a 100g drive parted in 1/2. Windows is on the 60g part and mandriva was on the 40g part. Well, when trying to install mint over the 40g part, it seems to ignore that part completley. I have never crashed windows when installing a linux distro. However, my options for install where, scs1 and resize and install on the largest contigous file. Well, it did not tell me where it wanted to go. Which I found out it wanted to install only on the windows part. Thus after spending a day re-installing windows ( need for my pocket pc and blackberry). I a, aftraid to re-install mint, I am afraid it will crash the first part again. Any ideas?

[Husse]

Now, did you manually edit the partition table?
If you don't I don't know what happens because I never follow that route. Manually editing gives you the ability to install in the second partition, if not - post back because then we are on to something odd.
And pls also read the section about partitioning in the Community Portal of the Mint Wiki

[Boo]

when i did my laptop i had XP and sled10 on 3 partitions and a chunk of unalocated space. I installed and let mint just use the unalocated space.

If your windows can see the mandriva partitions try to get rid of them and leave it as unalocated space. this may not work since MS may think it cant handle and ext3 partition or anything not MS.

otherwise live boot and use the GUI partition tool to unalocate the mandriva partitions and then install....
or use fdisk to unalocate the mandriva partitions if you like text mode...

hope this helps.

BTW i did find the partiton tool at install abit limited in creating my own partitions to install to.

[Husse]

BTW i did find the partiton tool at install abit limited in creating my own partitions to install to

It's GParted
But you need to right click to get some of the options, maybe not something you expect in an install