The other day, I thought I’d have a play with Linux, so I fished out an old PC and a magazine coverDC with TurboLinux on it.
The install didn’t go particularly well and the whole thing ended up not working - maybe I’ll have another go later, but for now, I have another use for this PC as a DOS machine.
So, I booted from a Win98 Floppy and ran FDISK, but something strange has happened:
Displaying the partition information reports a small NON-DOS partition and a large EXT DOS partition - removing the small one was no problem, but it wouldn’t let me delete the large one, because it says there is a logical drive in there - but when I try to delete the logical drive in the EXT DOS partition, it says there isn’t one.
As a related note, I found that after an abortive Redhat install, I still could not get the machine to boot NT even after I had previously wiped all partitions clean. Turns out I also needed to do “fdisk /MBR” to get rid of GRUB.
Try creating additional logical drives in the ext partition. Then delete them. Try resizing the ext partition, or any other available command which writes to the partition table. The goal is simply to stir the bits enough to maybe get FDISK to take it.
Question: Is the PC’s hard drive bigger than the version of FDISK can handle? e.g. FDISK for DOS 3.11 assumed HDs ended at, I forget, 256MB or something else silly by todays standards. Perhaps you’ve got another size issue here, where your Win98 FDISK can’t deal with the size of the HD.
Is it practical to pull the HD from that machine and install it as a secondary one in another machine? Then you can run disk manager or one of the other win-based tools to rewrite the partition table.
I’ve also had decent luck with PartitionMagic. It can deal with almost anything. Costs $70 and is available for download from a link on their their site www.powerquest.com.
Weirdness; even after deleting all partition info, creating a new partition to use all of the available space and formatting it to FAT32, the machine is still trying to boot into Linux - ending with a ‘Kernel Panic’ line.
You can use Ranish Partition Manager to write a standard MBR onto your hard drive. Freeware and only 168k. I always put a copy onto my Windows Startup floppies.
When I tried installing RedHat it did some truly strange things to my partitions. I had the same problem in that FDISK was saying “there’s a drive here” and then when I went look for the drive, it would say “sorry, no drives to delete.” What I ended up doing was installing Windows 2000. During setup you can mess with partitions and Windows 2000 was quite happy to tell those Linux partitions where they could go!
FYI fdisk does the exact same thing to NTFS partitions (can’t delete because of logical drives but then there aren’t any logical drives). The linux fdisk can get rid of the NTFS partitions as well.
It’s not surprising that a microsoft product can’t handle something made by linux, but you would think that a microsoft product would be able to deal with something made by another microsoft product.