Cannot install XP bcoz of HDD partition problem

[reddy2004]

Hi all,

I has about 20GB of free space in the extended DOS partition (160GB disk).
I installed Redhat7.3 there.. (WinXP had crashed)
During installation of RH7.3 i left about 8MB of space in the end (After the swap) as free space.

I restored my system with a boot floppy. Obviously GRUB was gone after installing win98. I formatted my D: drive and tried to install winXP over there..but it failed (Got some error like Non bootable media or something).
Fdisk is reporting 1 primaryDOS, 1 extended DOS, and a new primary DOS????. I couldnt run partition magic (Error 711).

Tried using norton.. but even that says the partition tables have to be rewritten and data will be lost!!!.

Can any of you suggest a good utility to recover these partitions without
losing data.

[popper1987]

he you messed up with your hdd

i suggest you trying the following way

1. Backup your data
2. go to dos prompt(using boot disk) and type fdisk/mbr to restore the partition table
3. repartiton and format

after these steps if you want i can give full tutorial on instlling multiple os on hdd

best of luck