Spongebob wrote:
I'm still don't understand the purpose. I've never used fdisk except as fdisk /MBRto give me a master boot record. What's it going to do? Do I run it on the phantom drive, or do I run it somewhere else?
You've provided no context to your question. I recognize your name, and your subject line (because I just responded to another post with this subject line), but I delete messages immediately after dealing with them (and therefore don't have the thread immediately available to go back and look through), and pretty much forget about them as well.
So whereas I still remember that you're having a phantom drive show up on a Win98/Linux box with two drives and lots of partitions, I don't know where this question is coming from. I suspect others on this list are likewise befuddled. I would suggest leaving enough of the previous conversation in your posts that anyone happening onto the thread in the middle can sort of figure out what's going on.
You don't understand the purpose of what? Of using the Win98 version of fdisk? Linux has a version of fdisk also, but you wouldn't use the "/mbr" switch with it.
The DOS, Win98, and Linux versions of fdisk all perform the same basic functionality of creating/deleting partitions on a drive. The DOS and Win98 versions have the "/mbr" switch to install a Master Boot Record. If you don't use "/mbr", the interactive program will appear, and you can use it to view existing partitions, or to delete/create partitions.
I suspect someone earlier in the thread suggested that you use fdisk to see what Win98 thinks its partition table looks like, to compare it to what Linux's fdisk sees.
-- Kent