JDBP>> It's worth noting, by the way, the very last entry given by FDISK. 
 JDBP>> This indicates that there are 5MeB of space on her second physical
 JDBP>> drive that aren't assigned to any partition.  The irony is that
 JDBP>> with the scheme chosen by Linda's guru, this space is completely
 JDBP>> unusable, since no more partitions can be created on the disc. 
 JDBP>> (Although one wonders why the fourth primary partition "J:" was
 JDBP>> created short like this.  Perhaps a side effect of creating the
 JDBP>> partition using a hex editor on the partition table and doing the
 JDBP>> arithmetic incorrectly ?  (-:) 

 MR> It might have been FDISK that did the bad math.  One of my drives has
 MR> 7MB of empty space at the beginning, and just a single logical drive
 MR> defined. FDISK did it, not me.

The 7MeB of space is almost certainly the 2 cylinders that have to separate
the primary MBR from the secondary MBR at the start of the "logical drive"
defined by the extended partition entry in the primary MBR, and the secondary
MBR from the start of the actual partition contained in that "logical drive".  
FDISK *has* to arrange things in such a way because one of the rules of the
partition table seems to be that partition creation programs must align all
partitions to cylinder boundaries.

That's not what is happening in Linda's case.  She doesn't have *any* extended 
partition.  There's no room to create one.  All four entries in her primary
MBR are already filled with other things.

Given that her guru created this setup by hand editing the primary MBR in hex
with Norton Utilities (as Linda said a few messages back), I strongly suspect
that my hypothesis of incorrect arithmetic in calculating the sizes is in fact 
the case here.

On the other hand, it may just be an artifact of geometry translation.  We'll
know for certain when Linda posts the output of PARTLIST for us.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

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