FDISK no longer sees the Hard Drive?

Give an old man some help folks. We been using PC’S since Apple II, then Apple IIe, then Apple GS, then Apple GS with a IBM card, then IBM & DOS, then DOS 5 & 6 & 6.1 & 6.2 & 6.22, then Windows 3 & 3.1 etc. , then Windows 95, then Windows 98 & 98 2nd edition, then ME, then 2000 Pro (good, but didn’t like that one) and now here we are at Windows XP Pro. All this time we never had a problem with the operating system and Hard Drives.

Subject to discuss:
Partitioning and formatting the Hard Drive. All along since DOS we been using "FDISK" and FORMATâ€. Never a problem.

However, I got one now and don’t where to turn. Here is the specific:

I got a notion I wanted to try the "LINUX" operating system.
I took a 40 Gig Hard Disk "“ the "only" drive in the system and partitioned it in 4 equal parts using FDISK.
Made Partition 1 the DOS active "C" drive.
Then made partition 2 the drive "Dâ€, "E" & "Fâ€.
Formated drive "C" useing FORMAT and made it bootable with Windows 98 system.
Formatted "Dâ€, "E" & "F" using FORMAT.
I now had a good 40 Gig Hard Drive ready to go.

However, when I got through installing SUSIE LINUX 7.0 the system did not respond. I am sure it was my doing something wrong.

So, I want to wipe the drive clean, repartition and reformat.

But, FDISK no longer sees the drive.

Where do I go from here folks?

Thanks

 

I'll assume you used a Win98 bootdisk with fdisk & format funtions on it, Formatted the drive as fat32 then convertrd it to NTFS durring the WinXP pro install. Is this correct? if so it probably has to do with NTFS and sercurity.

Just an idea to try is to boot off the suse install cd and if it gives you an option to partition just make it one big partition and format it, then reboot with the win98 bootdisk and recreate your partitions and reformat. I believe Suse uses the YAST installer and I have not ever tried Suse. A dual boot system isn't the easiest or hardest thing to setup it can be done it just requires some research and planning. Here's a good site to search for Linux info.

bubba169

 

Hi.

If you installed Win98 then Linux, more than likely Linux rewrote the MBR on the hard drive. You didn't say you installed XP on that drive so it wouldn't have gotten to NTFS so that shouldn't be a problem.

Download a "low level format" program from the manufacturer's site and do a low level format then an fdisk and format as usual. Should straighten it right out.

You might try keying (from a floppy boot disk) "fdisk /mbr" (without the quotes). That might do it but I would do a low level as noted above. Hope this helps.

 

Got the reply's .

The best was a "low level format ".
Did that and got my full 40 gig drive back up and running.

Thanks