Greetings,

I bought a new big and shining Maxtor 45GB IDE dirve, and decied to to
install Linux to a Linux partition I created in Partition Magic (by resize
the partition before it and then create a new Linux partition). System
Commander, which I use to switch between systems, didn't recognized it. I
chose setup in System Commander and set the partition to bootable, and still
couldn't boot to Linux. I gave up. (According v system website, it has to be
on a HD with no more than 1024 cylinders, so I need to install it to a
smaller HD.)

Now, my system has this ghost drive (named "Local Disk") that mess up the
order of my drive names. My software does not work since this ghost drive is
occupying its drive letter. If I double-click on the drive, it says "The
disk in drive E is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" I chose
"NO." If I right click and select format, I can tell by size that this ghost
HD actually includes both the partition before Linux and Linux partition
itself. I'm afraid if I choose to format it, it would erase the other FAT32
partition with data on it. I then use Partition magic to delete this
partition, and create a new FAT32 partition (it becomes not bootable,
logic). Reboot, the ghost HD is still there. From system properties, it says
Drive E is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system.

From partition Magic, all the space of the drive has been used by different
partitions and they all show up on desktop. This HD should not exist at all.

Someone suggested to boot to DOS and type FDISK /mbr but warned that if I
use Disk Manager to format the disk then I should not try this. I indeed
used Disk Manager that came with the drive to create all 3 partitions. So,
what can I do to get rid of this drive? I probably can reformat the whole
45GB, but it would take a lot of effort to move data around. I have to
backup a lot of files to do that.


Thanks for the help,


Changhsu Liu

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