erm, hi. hopefully this is fixable and someone can help me out :o

i dualboot slack and winxp. earlier this morn, i removed xp, installed 98se, reinstalled xp, removed 98, removed xp, reinstalled 98, reinstalled xp and took 98 back off. threw the almighty slack 9 disc in, tried setting hda2 back as bootable and reconfigging lilo, then discovered something wasn't... right.

to make a long, rambly post not so long and rambly...

each time i try to run cfdisk, the program refuses to come up. i get an error message about my logical partitions overlapping. i don't see how my logical partitionS could be overlapping; it's not like i have more than one!#!

partition magic won't pick any of the master drive's up partitions up. there's just a large, ugly, yellow, 38gb section labeled 'BAD' :o

on the bright side (?), xp's computer management DOES see all three partions ((win - 20gb, slack - 17gb, swap - 500mb)), and claims they're healthy. then again, it's windows -- i'm not sure i can trust it.

i can get into either os w/o a problem, though i have to use the CD to boot into slack. no problems doing things in windows, not sure about slack as i haven't tried.

erm, so anyway. partition problems seem bad; i assume i should be worried, so i am :P

is there anything i can do to fix this, short of formatting, creating new partitions and doing reinstalls? i FEAR putting slack back on this box because i'm completely clueless. i won't be able to do the important things like upgrade the kernel to 2.6, get my modem and hardware running, etc. if it's gotta go, this will be the end of me and linux for a while because i don't have the time to dedicate to starting from square one and working my way back up, and probably won't for quite some time. sucks, kuz i heart linux and i don't want to lose it. wah :/

before anybody flames me for being lazy and not wanting to learn, it's not that, but really, getting slack on this machine in the first place was a b@#$!. it took a good three days for my friend to get it working in the first place -- and he's, like, an... ubergeek, who knows what he's doing... while i'm clueless, and uhm, lost.

ok, so i lied about making this not so long and rambly... heh heh.

I had Redhat9 running on a new 2.6 GHz comp in just under 4-5 hours.
Thats considering booting the cd, using fdisk to delete the recovery fat32 partition, and rebooting the cd to create and install Linux.

Try running Linux fdisk on your drive.

'fdisk -l /dev/hda '
fdisk -l /dev/hdb'

whichever is your disk that has overlapping partitions.
Take note the cylinder start/end numbers and see if they overlap according to the table from linux.
Logical partitions usually reside in extended partitions. so view extended partiton information.

fdisk shows the following:

i'm clueless when it comes to partitions, so it's, uhm, stupid question time.
is there _anything_ i can do to fix this w/o causing massive damage to my slack install? if i boot back into it, and remove hda1, will that solve the problem... or am i screwed?

I think I have a similar problem to you.

# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40027029504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4866 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1025 ?--> 4866 30860865 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 1276 4803 28338660 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 4804 4866 506047+ 82 Linux swap

Err... surely that first partition shouldn't cover to the end of the disk if other partitions exist!

So since Win98 is pretty much fully installed, one can assume it has overwritten the Linux partitions.

And I don't think "logical" here means logical, as I don't have any lgical drives yet cfdisk still complains. I don't have partition magic but I doubt it can do any more than fdisk.

What I did wrong was to use DOS FDISK instead of linux fdisk, thus overwriting the partition table and breaking the entire computer.
I then after a while (once enough data had been written to the windows partition to overflow onto Linux) found that grub wouldn't start with error 16, so I temporarily did fdisk /mbr (probably the last thing I should have done), and continued.
Then using a slack cd I tried to mount /dev/hda2, and it said "Not a directory", which is absolute rubbish, and rarely do Linux programs output total rubbish, so something must be severly wrong. So after visiting http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition-Rescue/, I came here to drown my sorrows in tears.

And additionally it is "my bedtime" and my older brother will forever think I am a complete numbskull.

Ah well, life goes on.

To conclude I must say there is little chance of recovering from this situation if the data from windows overlaps onto Linux. At least I only lost the mail and addresses, and not the documents.