Can't get disk space back under Win98
 

I installed RedHat Linux 9.0 on a system running Win98SE. I have a hard drive with partitions c:\ to f:\ and used PartitionMagic 7.0 to create additional space for Linux. I made a stupid mistake with the bootloader during the Linux setup and could not get into Windows anymore. Eventually I managed to restore Windows but I ended up with a 4 MB d:\ drive with nothing on it that screwed up the starting of nearly all my programs because the drive letters all moved down by one. The space allocated for Linux is no longer available under Windows and PartitionMagic shows the whole extended partition (c:\ to f:\) as “BAD”, therefore I cannot make changes to the partitions anymore. Even fdisk under DOS freezes when I try to use it and that has never happened to me before. I noticed that the empty d:\ drive is FAT whereas all other logical drives are FAT32 and I tried to use the Windows FAT Converter but it reported that the drive is too small for conversion.
The funny thing is that Windows still works fine except for the changed drive letters. Any ideas?

The reason you can't access the space under windows is probably because you formatted it for linux.

Thanks for the reply,
have meanwhile found out that PM 7.0 does not support ext3 partitions. However, repartioning from RH 9.0 using the ext2 format did not solve the problem, PM still reports the whole drive as "BAD" and DOS fdisk still hangs.

I had some trouble getting win98 to read a drive that had been partitioned for linux, although it never froze fdisk...

In the end it just took lots of elbowgrease (figuratively) trying every which way of clearing the drive and partitioning it. I used diskdrake on mandrake 9.1 to clear all partitions and then create a FAT32 fs, I also used it to simply clear the drive of all partitions. This might allow fdisk to read it better.... I also had an excellent floppy from Maxtor, the manufacturer of my drive, which had it's own partitioning and formating app. I used fdisk (running off a floppy cause I had no OS) to delete all the partitions and create a primary DOS partition. In the end I just had to try over and over and over, but win98 eventually was able to install ok after fdisk erased all partitions and win98 setup formatted the drive itself. I know the situation was slightly different (I had a safe backup of all data and could clear off entire drive) but I hope some of that helps.

mcd