I moved this from the General section....I think I posted in the wrong place.

I'm trying to install Slackware 9.0. I'm a total linux noob but I know how to read the installation tutorial. I can boot off the cd and log in as root. I used a win 98 boot disk to format a spare hard drive. First I set the whole drive as the primary partition. When I got to setting up the linux partions the linux fdisk said it was only a 695 meg hard drive but it's a 10 gig western digital hard drive. It said it wasn't a dos partition. So i read the installtion notes again and it said to use dos fdisk to create a small dos partition and leave the rest for linux. So i tried again and used dos fdisk to create a 500 meg dos partition and left the rest of the drive untouched. But when I got to the linux fdisk it still said i had a 695 meg hard drive and it wasn't a dos partition. I can only use fdisk in a read-only state. I cannot write any partition changes.

I hope my question makes sense. I cannot continue with the rest of the installation if I don't create a primary linux partition and a linux swapfile partition.

Is there a better way to set up my hard drive?

By the way, I have to use the ibmmca.s kernal at the boot prompt.

Ermm... I think you should append the device path to the fdisk (or cfdisk) command...

ie. fdisk /dev/hdb (for slave HD on IDE 1).

By default fdisk will look at /dev/hda (I think).

oh geez, I think I was trying to format the cd drive, I'm going to try again a specify fdisk /dev/hdb, I was putting fdisk /dev/hda and my harddrive is a slave and the CD-ROM is the master.

Got it working. It runs like a dream now.