I was installing mandrake 8.0 and during the process of adding users, it seemed to freeze (it's hot here, who knows) anyway, I hit ctrl-alt-del and it shut down the installation.

Now when I went back, the 3 gigs of space that were partitioned are now gone! I can't find them with fdisk, partition magic, or fips. I somehow even wrecked my windows partition, but I still can't seem to find that 3 gigs. Does anyone know of how I can totally clear my partition table of _ALL_ partitions?

In case it makes a difference (although I assume it doesn't) ... I have a 40 gig hard drive, but my motherboard is old and can only find about 8 gigs of it. So losing 3 is kind of a big deal until I can get a new motherboard.

I am kind of in a bind right now, so any help would be great! Thanks!

Are you not at least using something like EZBios to let your old machine use the full size? I had to install a 40gb drive into a P200 today, no problem (actually I think EZBios has done something to my bios as the insall program always hung.. but i guess i can just flash my bios to get rid of it).

I had a similar problem like that a while ago, which was largely due to the whole 8.4gb barrier i think. in the end i moved my partition by 2mb, and it got reported correctly, but i guess you just want to nuke everything.. something i don't know about for sure.

chris
xxxx

An update to my situation, when I exited from fdisk after wiping my partition table, I decided to go back into fdisk to create the new partition. Well, I "mentally" rebooted my machine, meaning I thought I did, when in actuality I didn't. I got all my space back ... well just 8 gigs of it.

It makes me wonder about getting my computer to see all 40 gigs. I would kind of like to get some more life out of my motherboard (although it's only a pII 266, it has been good to me).

What do you mean by moving your partition over by 2mb? Does anyone have any other suggestions as to how to accomplish this? I have a pII 266, I don't know the chipset, because I'm at work (and it seems that this code red worm has infected my ISP based on its performance this morning). I already tried upgrading my bios, but that doesn't seem to work.

Thanks!

EZ-BIOS is can be found in WD's Data LIfeguard Tools programs, all fits on a bootable floppy, and you're away...

http://www.westerndigital.com/servic...s/dlgmaker.exe

most HD makers seem to have an equivalent, Maxtor etc...

likesay, I've got a net gateway and MP3 server on a P1 200Mhz, with a 40gb drive: Sweet as a nut me old china!

When I've had problems with removing linux partitions, i just use my mandrake 7.1 installation disk, and simply reboot after it's sorted out the partitions for me! diskdrake is a great program

chris
xxxx