Troubles with HDD in Win98 after Mandrake 7.2 install

[Blokemeister]

Hi there, I'm having difficulties with my HDD in Win 98, having just installed Mandrake 7.2. Basically, the computer just sits there, with the HDD LED flashing on and off, chewing on the drive. I'm assuming there's either a problem after partitioning with diskdrake, or that Windows is ****ting itself after finding an ext2 partition that it can't read.

The major slowdown goes on for about 4-5 mins, then the comp. goes as normal. But every now and again it will go into slo-mo again(probably trying to access the linux partition I guess).

Anyone had similar probs or know of a solution or fix? Mandrake install went fine and runs perfectly, used diskdrake on the 3rd of 3 ten gig partitions. I used "auto allocate" to set it with the root, swap and home partitions within the 10gig one, formatted as ext2.

Any advice or help would be great, cos windows is pretty useless as is.
Thanks,
Blokemeister

[Blokemeister]

I just ran fdisk, and it listed my HDD as:

Cyl's:
start end ID
Hda1 1 1275 c win95 FAT 32 2 1276 3737 5 Extended
5 1276 2506 b win95 FAT 32
6 2507 2952 83 Linux
7 2953 2983 82 Linux swap
8 2984 3737 83 Linux

So, a couple of questions:
- What partitions should be changed to what, and will it affect data on the partition in question?
- Is the fact that that partitions 2 and 5 start from the same cylinder causing a problem, or is that part of the logical drive setup?
- If I change the Linux partitions to type 5, will linux still be able to see and use them?

Any further clues appreciated!!