Partitioning problem with windows vs. linux (solved)

[Michael Wiktowy]

I think that I have resolved this problem.
When I downloaded a free utility called Data Lifeguard for the Western
Digital drive that I have, it warned me that support for large drives
was not enabled for my w2k as soon as I finished the installation of it.
It said that this is needed for drives over 137GB in size. It made a
change to the w2k registry and rebooted and ... volia ... w2k is happy
as a clam after adding a partition via Knoppix fdisk. <sigh>

I would imagine that XP would have this enabled by default. But a word
of warning to those who have installed w2k from old media and have
patched it up to the latest and greatest Service Pack ... make sure you
download a utility from your disk manaufacturer to enable this switch
manually since the updating process does not do this.

However, this does represent a ticking timebomb for curious people
wanting to setup a dual-boot w2k-linux box. They may find themselves
with a dead w2k system after things get partitioned up during their
Linux install with no easy way to install and run this magic utility
that puts the right entries into their registry to prevent w2k from
barfing. ... and there doesn't seem to be anyway for anaconda to work
around this. Maybe something for the wiki or release notes. I'll put in
a bugzilla and see if it gets any attention.

Anyways ... thanks to the people who helped me narrow things down.
I think that I learned a lot more about partition tables than I ever
wanted to know :]

/Mike