I delete a partation of my hard drive and it was the wrong one i guess and now i can do any, when the computer boots up it says operating system missing. I hope there a way to fix this. Its a 1.59Gb drive. Fdisk wont let me delete the other partition. Help!! please! thanks!

Well if you deleted ur operating system then you gotta reformat. hope you didn't have anything important on there

yeah.. looks like a reinstall to me to fix that problem.

Well if you still kinda know what the partition sizes where you can often still recover it pretty well. I screwed up my partition table a while ago and lost three partitions with 40gigs of data. After doing lots of research, dd'ing sectors and a bit of hex editing I was able to recover all my data.

Here is a list of the sites I got some usefull information from:

http://ata-atapi.com/hiwmbr.htm
http://www.datarescue.com/laboratory/partition.htm
http://www.itechs-systems.com/pages/software.htm
http://www.data-recovery-software.com/bp.htm
http://www.geocities.com/rlcomp_1999...dures/mbr.html
http://www.winternals.com/products/r...kcommander.asp
http://windows2000.about.com/cs/diskpartitionsw/
http://cvs.sslug.dk/hdmaint/hdm_rescue.html

Maybe none of them are of use to you, but if you value the data on that partition it might be worth the trouble to at least try.

If you have deleted the partition and done nothing else. If you know the size it was you can try to recreate it with fdisk. This has worked for me when I deleted the partition table by mistake!

i deleted the one partition and i didn't know it was the wrong one. The one with red hat on it was the an 'ext dos' partition and now it wont let me delete it and it says "cannot delete while logical drivers exisit".
help!

MS-DOS fdisk will have a dummy spit when trying to delete any Linux partitions. Try either of these DOS utilities;

AEFDISK - download from http://www.aefdisk.com )
EFDISK (it's part of mrbooter) - download from http://www.masterbooter.com

Be careful, they can/will nuke ANY partition if you want them to, not just Linux.

Okay.. I might misunderstand what's up with your drive.. but it sounds like all you care about is making the drive usable again... If I'm wrong.. well.. hell.. ignore the rest of this...

But, otherwise... go to the drive makers web site and download the free utilities they have for their drives... they all have them... Usually you download a file that makes a bootable floppy... Boot to the floppy and there will be a maintanence or tools section... in there you'll be able to 'fill the drive with all zeros' or 'format the drive' whatever they call it.. After you do that, you'll be able to use the drive just like it was new.... and very, very, very blank!

HI Mike..
First of all, do not format your hard disk yet. Do no delete any more partitions.
If LILO doesn't boot, like when it says operating system missing, it does'nt mean that you lost everything...

If you have bootable Linux CD (any distro), boot using that CD.
It will take you to a LILO prompt. At the point, you have many options like whether you want to upgrade linux, or rescue. Choose rescue or type 'linux rescue'. It will mount your CD on /mnt/sysimage. Once you have reached that point, you can be able to look at your partitions including ext2, ext3 and other linux partitions including fat32 (this is something you can not do using MSDOS FDISK utility). You can use linux fdisk to find out the partition map. This will help find out what partition you deleted. Once you know about it, you can use a few 3rd party tools to regain it back.

Unless you post more info, like how many partitions you had etc, no one will be able to help you..