hi,
i have suse 9.3 & win98 on my system. When i installed the linux then i forgot to format the drive which i choosed for linu. at the time of installation (without formating) i break that 21GB drive into 15GB(for win) 500MB for swap and rest for the linux.
Now the problem is this that when i check the drives frm linux its all good but windows shows me full 21GB drive ....and surprisingly no data loss( actually it seems that some files might have corrupted or Windows shows the message
that they are not on the disk.....help me out....is there something that i'll see only 15GB in windows....
One more thing how can i format that drive(15GB) frm linux...i dont knw the command because i'm a
tnx

Well to format a drive in linux you use fdisk or cfdisk .
Do fdisk -h or cfdisk -h to get help.

Then to put an ext3 filesystem on it use "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdxx" (where xx is something like a1)

Just see what kind of mkfs tools you have to make other filesystems like ext2 , reiserfs, ....

I think fdisk and cfdisk commands can be used for repartitioning and not for formating.

means at this stage probably he used "fdisk / cfdisk " command, but he didn't formatted the drives.....must have just assigned the id 83 and 82 to linux and swap partitions.

But me too can't understand that why from the windows its showing the drive size as 21/22 Gb.
If he format that portion in windows..will he loose the linux part too ???

regards

from the symptoms described it seems that the partitions were just added to the partition table without the update of the previous partition data (should be impossible if done using fdisk or similar tool) Personally i did such a thing by editing partition table manually (was some kind of experiment) and then i got two overlaping partitions. such a situation is of course very bad if it occurs (if the windows partition starts from beginning of the disk and is followed by linux partitions its very probable that linux partitions get overwriten when more data is saved on windows partition and the system writes behind the begining of linux drive. Same problem when there were files on windows partition and You installed linux on its partition files that were located in that area were overwriten. I could tell more if You could provide dump of partition data.
you could use linux fdisk to get that data.
Just login as root and type fdisk /dev/hda then pres p then q
after pressing p fdisk should show your current partition table.
ps /dev/hda is the node where your drive is located if its not functioning you can try /dev/hdb /dev/hdc /dev/hdd or if its sata drive /dev/sda an the like till you get a valid result

ps I would not format this too large poartition from linux as this could damage data on other partitions first thing to do is to check if your partition table holds correct data in it and if not repair any problems