13 Gigs, partitions and install

A friend of mine called me up and said he was going to try out
linux. He has a brand new Asus motherboard, new BIOS, and a 13 gig
disk. He wants to put Win98 and linux on it.

I suggested he install '98 before linux. He partitioned 8 gigs as
FAT32 and installed win98. He thinks he left the rest unpartitioned.
Then he started the Redhat install. Disk druid said he only had a few
megs free, so he thought he'd go back and start over again. In DOS
again, fdisk wouldn't let him delete his partition complaining about
extended partitions, but when he tries to delete them it tells him
there are no extended partitions.

I haven't been at his house, so I can't say for sure whether he's
doing something really stupid or not. Has he messed up the beginning
of the partition table or his MBR? Should we try to delete the
partitions from the linux fdisk? (That reminds me, he says now his CD
won't boot, though it did before he tried this.) Do we need to dd the
first few sectors of the hard drive? If so, what was the command line
again? (Mark?) He also isn't sure whether or not Windows was flakey
(flakier than normal) when he installed it, so there might also be
questions about the hardware itself. I can't get to his house till
next week. Any initial suggestions or simple solutions?

Thanks,
       Les...
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Received on Fri Jul 9 11:34:33 1999