I'm trying to convert an old compaq presario (pentium mmx 233, 48mb) in a dual boot box, but am running into serious partitioning problems. I resized the existing fat partition and thenm using fdisk (from the linux rescue cd 0.2.15) I made some partitions. When I went to check what I'd done there were spaces between the paritions so I tried again after first deleting all the partitions except the fat. Still no luck so I tried qtparted (knoppix). Don't ask me how, but to make a long story short I messed up to the point where windows fdisk no longer could read the disk. I finally managed to erase it (using partition magic) and create a new fat partition using windows fdisk, but it still only recognises half the disk (I hope the other half will be recognised by linux. In betwen linux fdisk also told me it couldn't read the disk.

Now for the real question (other than why something so relatively simple turned oput to be such a horrible botch job). Is there a way undo all this simply cleaning up all the mess I made on the disk. It appears that even cleaning a disk with fdsik (either linux or windows) still leaves some traces that make it impossible to read the disk properly. (I remember reading something about low level reformating...)

The HD is 48 Megabytes? What are your partition schemes, 24 and 24? Just curious how you are running it, seems a bit tight to be dual booting...

Nonetheless, let's see what we can do.

I don't believe an 'undo' exists, but if there is no data necessary to recover, you can play. Using linux fdisk, delete all partitions (the 'd' key). Then create 1 partition encompassing the entire disk (n, p, 1, enter). Write this, (w) and then create a filesystem (we'll use ext2) mke2fs /dev/hda1 (assuming this is hda). Now, mount it:
mkdir /mnt/hda1
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
And then use df to see if the entire disk is there (minus the 5% given to root, you can adjust that with the mke2fs command, read the man page if you are interested).

If it is, you can then go back and use fdisk to play around with sizes to get the desired partition sizes you are looking for.

Good Luck!

Cool

thanks for the reply. My info was icomplate: the box has 48Mb ram and an 8G HDD.

I'll try making the filesystem though. Hadn't done that before.