how do i go about running fdisk in linux?

type "fdisk" at a command prompt.

if you tried that, are you doing it as root?

what are you trying to do with fdisk?

hmm alright how do i run as root
trying to boot with windows

you'll need to provide more information - you mean you're booting windows, or you have windows and are trying to boot linux? why do you want to run fdisk?

to run as root, at a terminal type "su", enter, and then the root password

i am trying to change mmy NTFS file systeem from hidden to non hidden so that i may boot up xp

If you have installed linux on the same PC as windows then you will need to boot windows with lilo - lilo is the boot menu that comes up with linux and it can have an optin to boot windows. What distro is it you installed? Some will have added wndows to lilo already. If not, you may have to do it... It is also possible that if you recently installed linux you may have accidentally wiped the windows drive. You will have to give details. If you do su and type the root passsword then do:

fdisk -l /dev/hda

and post the results, this may give some some idea of what is going on...

linux and windows are on the same drive. windows still exists and i cam slect it as a boot option, it'l go through the little scroly thingy and a screen will say xmnt2002 program not found-skiping disk check
i think it goes by real quick. what i can tell from surfin' the web id that i need to turn my ntfs from hidden to regular (type 17 apperntly dont know what that means) my exprence with linux is very limited. mandrake 10.1 is whats running, fdisk /dev/hda gives:
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help):

with fdisk -l/dev/hda:

fdisk: invalid option -- /

Usage: fdisk [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK Change partition table
fdisk -l [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK List partition table(s)
fdisk -s PARTITION Give partition size(s) in blocks
fdisk -v Give fdisk version
Here DISK is something like /dev/hdb or /dev/sda
and PARTITION is something like /dev/hda7
-u: give Start and End in sector (instead of cylinder) units
-b 2048: (for certain MO disks) use 2048-byte sectors

cfdisk is a nice user interface for fdisk, I recommend it highly. You can enter cfdisk at the command prompt and then choose the type option from menu at the bottom of the screen. A list of fs types will come up and you can choose the number for the fs of your choice. Then once that is done choose write type yes and then choose quit. That should do the trick, if that's what you need to do.

01 FAT12 1E Hidden W95 FAT16 (LB 75 PC/IX BE Solaris boot
02 XENIX root 24 NEC DOS 80 Old Minix C1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-12)
03 XENIX usr 39 Plan 9 81 Minix / old Linux C4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-16 <
04 FAT16 <32M 3C PartitionMagic recov 82 Linux swap C6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-16)
05 Extended 40 Venix 80286 83 Linux C7 Syrinx
06 FAT16 41 PPC PReP Boot 84 OS/2 hidden C: drive DA Non-FS data
07 HPFS/NTFS 42 SFS 85 Linux extended DB CP/M / CTOS / ...
08 AIX 4D QNX4.x 86 NTFS volume set DE Dell Utility
09 AIX bootable 4E QNX4.x 2nd part 87 NTFS volume set DF BootIt
0A OS/2 Boot Manager 4F QNX4.x 3rd part 8E Linux LVM E1 DOS access
0B W95 FAT32 50 OnTrack DM 93 Amoeba E3 DOS R/O
0C W95 FAT32 (LBA) 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux1 94 Amoeba BBT E4 SpeedStor

which one am i lookin for in this i see three diffrent ntfs systems and i ant got a clue which one i want/need
nevermind think i got it thank yeall very mutch.

next time please keep your problem in one thread...

I would suggest that the id of the ntfs drive should be -- 7

That's what mine is

I posted in your other thread and it is 7 not 17. I changed mine to 17 and got the same error but it booted. Changed back to 7 and no error