Luke Kearney wrote:
you are of course absolutely correct. What I mean to say was/dev/hda1 win2k /dev/hda2 FBSD /dev/hda3 <---- where i am hoping to install deb. So I my difficulty is simply that I don't seem to be able to correctly write the partition info to disk. I get an error saying that the information was written but could not be re-read and to reboot. Fromthere of course I cannot initialize any partitions.
I've seen this on a USB flash memory card "drive". Of course that's a totally different animal, but the point is that this flash drive had become unusable in Windows, Mac OS/X and in Debian. And when I went to repartition/reformat it, I saw the same symptoms.
So my gut instinct is that the partition table has become so corrupted/mangled/foreign/damaged that the Debian tools can't handle it. But this is just a gut instinct, not experience, talking.
Since you have FBSD installed, you might try its partitioning tools to create a partition (any kind) on /dev/hda3, just to see what happens.
-- Kent