OK, here's the first of many stupid questions to come ... I should probably just start a running thread for them. *sigh*

When I try to use cfdisk to partition the free space on my HD, it won't let me "see" the other partitions I have on my HD (an ~80GB XP and ~70GB that I've installed Debian, then FreeBSD, and now Debian again). The only free space it shows is about 660MB. Am I supposed to be able to see the other partions on my HD like you can with the Windows, Debian, and BSD partition utilities? Do I need to uninstall Debian first? (I didn't need to do that with the Debian setup utility) I guess I really need a tutorial on cfdisk so I can bridge the gap to Shilo's Slackware tutorial.

You shouldn't need to uninstall anything just to see the partitions with cfdisk. When you type `fdisk -l /dev/hda` (or hdb or whichever disk you're looking at) what do you get?

I tried a lot of different combinations of parameters with fdisk (at least the ones that were listed in the help) and got a similar result each time. When I tried:

it seemed like it was doing something but I got the same result when I entered fdisk -l /dev/hda.

It doesn't see 668MB of free space. The first line is a summary line so I read that as fdisk sees a disk of 668MB in total with a bad partition table. For example, the clunky Compaq sitting in the corner opposite me returns the following for its 20GB hard disk with `fdisk -l`:

If your windows install is still working, what does the disk manager report for the partitions? It looks to me like it's time to back up whatever you can before you start losing data.

I don't have enough experience with drives to know whether that will be fixed by backing it up, blowing it away and starting from scratch.

I was thinking about starting over again anyway because I made the Windows partition way too big. The only thing that makes me not want to is having to redownload all the Steam games I have on the XP partition.

I think my main point of confusion is that when I ran the Debian installer this afternoon and got the the partition magnager part it recognized all the partitions that were on there (including the Windows and the FreeBSD) and let me create/delete any partitions that I want, but no dice with the Slack utility.

I appreciate the help though.

OK ... where's the "I'm with stupid" smily? My HD was /dev/hdd not /dev/hda I'm too tired to finish setting Slack up, but at least now it *should* be smooth sailing with Shilo's Installation Guide.

I love that word - "should"