Don't shoot me but this was unavoidable.

I installed Mandrake 9 on my system alongside W98. No install problems. However, I had hardware problems when booted to Linux and had to delete it.

I have since repartitioned and re-formated my W98 portion of the hard drive but have never been able to regain the bit that Linux occupied. That means half of my hard drive is effectively missing.

I will be returning to learning and using Linux when I upgrade my system (it's six years old/ancient) but in the meantime I need to recover the missing half of my drive as W98 is rapidly running out of space.

Running fdisk does not show the missing portion.

Any help will be appreciated.

Regards,
N Z Russell.

If memory serves you should run fdisk and delete the non-Dos partition, but it's been a few years now since I last used Windows and even more since I last used Win98

Download an app called delpart.exe and make a windows boot disk. You can use it to delete any partition to blank space. Good luck expanding your fat32 partition without breaking anything though.

You could also boot off the mandrake cds and use fdisk/cfdisk from there (I guess, I don't use the distribution). Using knoppix or another bootable distro is another option.

Try partition magic. You won't loose anything. That's what I use. Got that from Kazaa.

I can partially agree with the first part of this statement, but not with the final words.
This is the beauty of Linux, you can use all these superior or at least equivalent packages legally, no need to go and download virus-infested malware from Kazaa!!!

MS fdisk can not recognize anything else than MS partitions;
use Linux fdisk instead. If you can, get Knoppix - this is a
Linux distribution which can be booted from cd, a good tool
to do all sorts of maintenance under a variety of os (which
ms crapware can't). Or try one of the Linux-on-a-disk distri-
butions, which can be booted from floppy disk.

HTH