This will probably strike most of you as an idiotic newbie question, but how can this be? I deleted nearly every file on hdb (my old windows 98 fat32 drive) yesterday, from the K file manager. I even emptied the trash bin in KDE.

Today I realized, after hours of troubleshooting my Linux unfriendly 3com Etherlink III ISA card, that the ONLY way to get Linux to recognize the bloody thing is to disable pnp and set the output media using a DOS program! So there I was, thinking I had to reinstall MSWIN just to change these settings on the NIC, and when I set the old drive to master and reboot, WINDOWS IS STILL THERE. So is all the other junk I DELETED from the fat32 drive.

What's going on?!?! Can Linux not write to a FAT32 drive? Is the stuff still there simply because I deleted it in Linux but never overwrote the space with new files?

I'd love to hear the story behind this one...

Linux can write to Fat32 since a long time - this is no problem.
But are you sure you really deleted the files? May be, you just Drag'n Dropped em to the trashcan, but the filesystem is only mounted read-only. So the files didn't get moved to the trash, they got copied instead - may be

fdisk under linux and delete that partion that will kill it for sure then creat a linux partion.

cheers

what is the fdisk program called under linux? When would it be a good time to delete partitions of other files systems?

what is the fdisk program called under linux?

you guessed it. "fdisk" (or "cfdisk) for a more menu-driven version

When would it be a good time to delete partitions of other files systems?

Naturally, you should do this only once you are sure you won't be needing anything on those partitions. In my case, I used a separate (smaller) drive exclusively for the Linux install (set to master, so it boots), and kept a bunch of data (in FAT32) on my main drive (set to slave), which I mounted within the Linux file system.

My setup is a little strange. I have two hard disk running on my desktop. One hard disk has a dual boot option (RedHat Linux 8.0 / Windows 98) and the other hard disk, [runs through a PCIAdaptor card] runs Win98. Sorry, the computer is old and cannot run Windows 2000 or XP.

In order for me to switch between the two drives, I need to disable one of the drives under the BIOS. Then, I can use the other drive as the active drive. Overall, there are 3 partitions on the desktop.

The other setup I have on a Pentium II Laptop on a 6 gig drive is Win98 (1 gig), Win2K (2 gig), and Mandrake Linux 9.1 (3 gig). This laptop also has 3 partitions.

I used fdisk using Windows 98 to set the inital partition. Then installed the Linux OSes. I have never tried to create partitions from the Linux OSes before.

Can the 'cfdisk' create other types of files systems besides the Linux files systems it uses?

most certainly. Linux' fdisk can create partitions for DOZENS (if not more) of different file systems.