messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

[das]

On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 19:30 -0400, j arwood wrote:
> She has an 8 GB HDD and now fdisk is only showing 2 partitions:
>         Partition 1 as an Extended DOS partition 353 MB
>         Partition 2 as a Primary DOS partition 24 MB With a status of
> A (active 
> I'm assuming) 

You can correct the problem with any linux installer CD. 
Boot in 'rescue' mode.
It will bring you to a limited-ability console. 
Run 'fdisk /dev/hda' there
Within fdisk, you will get the menu with 'm', but here what you need is
'd', that is delete. One by one 'd' all the partitions. 
When all the partitions are deleted, hit 'n': that is new partition. 
It will want to know logical or primary. 
In this case you will need 'primary'.
Hit 'p'. Then hit enter for the three queries. It will create a primary
parition '/dev/hda1' with the whole 8GB.
Now hit 't' to change the partion's system id. When you hit 't' it will
say to get the list of all id-s, you have to issue 'L'. 
You can also check with the list, but here, you will have to issue 'c'
that is for 'W95 FAT 32 LBA'.
Now issue 'p' to check if everything was done this way. 
Now hit 'w' to write the partition table on the disk. 
Hit 'q' to quite fdisk.
Issue 'mkfs.vfat /dev/hda1'
Now, your generating the VFAT partition is complete. Now you go into
MS-W installing and will see that it is getting your whole HD. And do
there what you want. 

One friend in this list suggested 'Partion-Magic', but I have seen so
many time Partition-Magic to fail. And I like it, we can even do the
Win-jobs better than MSW SW.

Don't forget to run the Windows fdisk thing there, and create partitions
there, with their kind of formatting. The VFAT that is generated by
linux systems and the MSW's own FAT 32 system has some minor
differences, that do show up problems at times. So, if you want to use
MSW there, do it their way. 

But, why, friend, why? Wouldn't your sister agree after you provide here
with a good ice-cream treat, to do it our FLOSS way? (Just Kidding)

---
das