Installation fails

[ionmich]

Installing from Mageia-2-KDE4-LiveCD.

'The CD burner verified the burned checksum. I selected a pre-partitioned hard drive connected via USB for my installation. There was a long wait after "Using '/etc/nvidia /ld.so.conf' to provide 'gl-conf' appeared on the screen. Long enough that I thought it had stopped. Which /etc would it be referring to, one on the install disk? But then it continued and the Nvidia logo flashed on the screen.

After some time, and little feedback, I got the message "Unable to copy files to new root." I was not concerned as I was installing to an external drive. I responded OK and restarted my box choosing to boot from the external drive from the BIOS. I wanted to see how far along it had installed and if any files had beet written. I was not surprised when "Error : No operating system" showed on the screen. But I was surprised when I rebooted to my internal hard drive and got a black screen of death. Now I have a dead Linux Mint installation.

I assume that even though it was "Unable to copy files to new root", it wrote something to an MBR NOT ON THE INSTALLATION DRIVE, without any warning.

Any explanation might help me in recovering my MBR.

Thanks.