tzulberti,

Only thing I can think of...

Check your BIOS, see if you have any ANTI-VIRUS, or BOOT SECTOR protection enabled... Some of the "older" BIOS's ( I had one ) that used this to "protect" the disk from "low-level" tampering - most of the time, viri can attack the MBR, but some of the viri would "tinker" with the partition information, thus making your hard drive not work. This is my best guess on this...

If it is a new hard drive, and completely empty - check that your cables are completely inserted, just one pin on that cable can cause problems if it isn't making full contact. Knoppix v3.3 was a lot easier to cfdisk than with v3.4 - You can also try running cfdisk before you run the install program -=- one more thing - you are doing all of this as root aren't you? do a su and be sure your prompt has root@... in front of it... You have to be root to do the cfdisk, and the install... Just some ideas...

Ms. Cuddles