Thanks for the info Harry.

I suspected that the 'D' partition was created from the original 'C' drive using the DOS *Fips* partition, since the Win98 data in the 'C' partition is unaffected. When I looked in My Computer in Win98, drive C and drive D are shown, however, drive D is not accessable. When I look under the property box, D is shown as FAT partition (C is FAT32 part).

I have seen Ranish Partition Manager online but it seems to be rather slightly out of date and the info on the webpage is incomplete. I have also seen info on cfdisk and qtparted - just more confusion!

I am actually thinking of doing a 'frugal install' (or 'poorman install' as you mentioned) for DSL. There is instruction for it called 'How to install DSL on the Hard Drive via DSL Frugal Installation (in pdf): http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...rugalHowto.pdf

In fact, before the 'frugal install' of DSL, cfdisk had to be performed - and I don't see how it is applicable in my situation. There is actually in liveCD DSL's GUI menu option of frugal install using either grub or lilo.

I really want to be clear about doing a dual-boot install and if it is possible at all to get for example bootable from either Win98 or Linux using DSL 'frugal install'???

But by all mean, please I would like to read about Debian install if you think that it is a better option - I'm just keeping my option open.