Cant fdisk partitions

[fluds1]

I loaded Man8 on my very old laptop but am not happy with how it runs, so I have decided that until I can afford anither laptop for it to be of any use to me I have to put win95 back on. (sorry). The problem is that when I try to fdisk the drive it does not see the EXT DOS partition. So I have lost half my drive. Has anyone had a similar problem. Thanks in advance.

[bdg1983]

In fdisk, have you tried 'delete non-Dos partition' as I've read here that it should work. If not, you can always use the Linux version of fdisk or any of the free partitioning tools available at freshmeat.net

[demian]

Originally posted by mick:
<STRONG>Has anyone had a similar problem.</STRONG>

Yup, I did (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=011885). Though it was even worse than in your case. I agree with mdwatts, if you have a running linux use linux fdisk to delete all the linux partitions. FoBoT pointed me to the Ranish Partition Manager (http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/) which seemed like a good tool but it couldn't handle the mess it found on the drive I used :o
What I ended up doing was writing zeros to the entire drive (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdN bs=1M count=####) to solve the problem. In your case it might be enough to just blank the mbr (the first 512b of the drive) to get rid of the partition table.

:eek: Disclaimer: The method with dd worked for me but it seems a rather cruel thing to do. I don't guarantee that it won't do any harm to your drive

[ 18 May 2001: Message edited by: demian ]

[fluds]

Thanks Demian (and FOBOT) for the link it works perfect. :D

[bdg1983]

Nothing for me? :( :( :(

I can take a hint. Is there a MS forum around?