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I have a 20GB drive and don't want four 5GB partitions.  I already had 
four primary partitions but wanted to delete one and make the fourth 
partition linux extended instead.

The cfdisk that came with BL2 does not make extended linux partitions.

I used the fdisk from busybox 1.3.2 that Karolis compiled.

It made hdb4 linux extended partition, and then hdb5 ext2 inside of that 
(first 500 MB), but would not write to disk (I did not note the error 
message, something about sizes I think).

Now busybox fdisk and cfdisk cannot even access /dev/hdb

fdisk /dev/hdb says:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2491.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could 
in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (....LILO)
2)  booting and partitioning software from other OSs (DOS...).
fdisk:
Unable to seek on /dev/hdb

fdisk -l says:
Unable to seek on /dev/hdb.

The partitions appear to be as they were before I ran fdisk (four primary 
and a lot of free space).

cfdisk:  fdisk /dev/hdb says
FATAL ERROR:  Bad logical partition 4:  Partition ends before sector 0.

I can mount the original primary partiion /dev/hdb4 (which did not get 
deleted because the 'write' did not work.

How do I fix this problem other than transferring files to a different 
drive and reformatting this one with dd?

Things still work (I have not rebooted) but I have 13GB unusable space 
after the four ext2 partitions (at least it acts that way apart from 
fdisk) and cannot even access the drive with fdisk.

Another drive let me make a fourth primary partition as DOS extended with 
a linux partition in that, but it messes up the drive letters on hda which 
is four DOS partitions.

Sindi

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org