I had a 3 GB drive that Win95 had divvied up into a 2 GB primary and a 1 GB extended partition. Since it had no bootable CD drive, I made some VectorLinux 2.0 boot disks (it's an old comp: 233 MHz PII, 96 MB RAM) and cranked up FDISK. Here is where my newbieness shows: since I thought I didn't need Windows any more, I deleted all the partitions. But now in the VL install process, CFDK gives me a error, and PARTED (obviously) doesn't have any partitions to edit at all. I can however access a console (which I have no idea what to do with).

Basically, I just want to make some new partitions and get on with things. If anyone can recommend any tools that can run from a floppy, or a way to get command-line PARTED to fix me up, that would be great. Just lurking here has a been a big help already. Thanks.

(note: running CRDK from console also gives a "Fatal Error: Cannot open disk drive"... do i need a separate CFDK bootdisk in order to use it, or can i just use PARTED for the appropriate tasks?")

cfdisk in a console ought to show you your hard disk. you might have to specify if you have more than one drive, e.g., cfdisk /dev/hda