Why cant I partition my hard disks??

Go into Bios and make sure the drive and size are properly recognized.

Then bootup with a bootdisk and run Fdisk. Delete all partitions that are on it now. Reboot and return to fdisk.
Make sure that it see the whole disk then create your primary partition and if you are going to boot from it set it active. then you can create your extended partitons.

Also yo may want to run scandisk first from the boot floppy!!!

I have 6 gigs of server and programming stuff, and a highly tuned win98 setup that is humming well, and I dont want to lose them....Any other suggestions?

You could go out and grab third party partitioning software, ie, partition magic. With that you should be able to get your disks partitioned without loosing your information.

See this URL for info.

http://www.powerquest.com/usindex.html

Actually, this one explains PM better:

hehehe

http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/index.html

Show us the output from the command:

..    FDISK /STATUS

for the "unpartitionable" drive.

sorry didn't know you had info on it.
I agree with otta show us the status.

but third party software is an option

How did you end up with drives that were not completely
partitioned in the first place, was it a limitation with your Bios?

You can not use FDISK to change A Primary Partition without destroying
the Data. It won't let you create one because you all ready have done
that and you can only have one Primary Dos Partition.

If there is Mega Bytes left, and your bios reports it to FDISK, it should
show up as unused, available as an extended partion of which you can
create logical drives. I have never done this Using FDISK on a drive that
has Data on it. I Feel Fdisk is too crude a tool to use on anything but
a new drive or one you are resetting from scratch. If I were fooling
around with partitions of a drive that had data I wanted to preserve, I would use something more sophisticated than FDISK.

As others have suggested ,an FDISK /INFO(and BIOS CHS values)
 would be interesting..

It sounds like you have a partiiton on each of these drives that occupies 100% of these drives and you want to use the free space on those partitions to make new partitions from????
Well if so you won't do it with FDisk, this is a rather tricky operation than will often hose data. I usually use the partsize utility that comes on linux CDs.

Are you running any disk managers?

AVOBERT, welcome to E-E
(first login: 4/30/00)

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