I am having problems getting F-disk and cfdisk to recognise the 20GB of unpartitioned space on my HDD. (there are also windows partitions there).

cfdisk only seems to recognise a little 600MB section of unpartitioned space at the end of the drive, and no the 20GB i cleared for it between to NTFS partitions.

here's what i found using fdisk. the only free space not classed as windows was:

dev/ide2 with size of 69786360 blocks (basically that 600 or so space at the end of the drive...)


when trying to use cfdisk again, it said:
FATAL ERROR: Bad Primary partition 0. partition begins after end-of-disk




Oh, and I'm a Linux virgin btw so please be gentle

I had a similar problem with cfdisk.
It couldn't recognize a FreeBSD partition.
But with fdisk everythig went fine. Try to delete this small partition, reboot and start fdisk again. On your own risk.
Next is BIOS low level formating