I tried splitting a working win98 harddrive with no success, as afterwards it would not boot correctly... but I saved it by using norton rescue to rewrite partition tables. So I'm planning to format the hd and start fresh making partitions in the beginning.... but

At this time, if I boot with linux floppies or boot cd and start going through installation, when I go to "partition hard disk" (I was just planning on veiwing the partition info last night when I tried this), Linux can't find any hard disks. If I remove the Linux boot floppies(or cd) it boots to windows just fine. Are there any common causes why linux would not be able to recognize a hard disk? I would like to fix this before flushing the hard drive of all the windows stuff it took me hours to put on!

Here are specs of pc in question:

20g IDE hd
Unsure of model ide controller, maybe the IDE controller is unsupported
P3 600E with PC100 bus
256ram
Sound Blaster Live128 aud.
Nvida 64 vid.
etc

Thanks

Could this be a controller issue?

I have :
Intel PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
Secondary IDE Controller (dual fifo)

and under SCSI controllers:
Promise Technology Inc. Ultra66 IDE Controller

And I have no idea how it's actually connected inside. I haven't opened up this PC before.

I just find it very odd that linux can't even find a hard drive. If anyone could help I would really appreciate it. I'd like to get the ball rolling on the install tonight if possible, and this is really holding me up. Thanks,
Garrett

I found that if I boot with debian disk 5 it recognizes my hardware, including USB. I think it's call bf2.4 or bf2.6. I guess that kernel has support for my controller. I will try the install tonight and get back to you guys. If it works out well, maybe I'll write up a howto for win98+Linux dual boot.

Thanks
Garrett