Sorry if this isn't the place to ask but I was impressed with the advice I got the last time!

It's a bit of a long question but essentially I have a dodgy partition table which I would like to fix. Details below -


At the moment I am still a slave to windows but am trying to break free!!


System - PII350, 256MB Ram, Hard drives -40GB Western Digital as Primary master, 6.4GB Quantum fireball as primary slave.

Since installing my new HD (the western digital drive) I wanted to leave a little room for Linux in a dual boot. Partitions made with dos fdisk - C:6GB (primary, fat32, active with win98 installed) and F: (extended 22GB with logical drive 22GB fat32 to share with linux)

My problems started when I tried to install redhat9 and got an error message that "the partition table on /dev/hda is inconsistent......" The redhat installation suggested that it may be a BIOS problem but I have the latest BIOS available and the drive is set up to be accessed with LBA.

I found my Knoppix CD and booted away
QTParted gives me the following
dev/hda
01 /dev/hda-1 free 0.03MB 0.00 to 0.03
02 /dev/hda1 fat32 Active 5.86GB 0.03 to 5.86
03 /dev/hda2 extended 21.5GB 5.86 to 27.36
04 /dev/hda-1 free 0.03MB 5.86 to 5.86
05 /dev/hda5 fat32 21.50GB 5.86 to 27.36
06 /dev/hda-1 free 9.92GB 27.36 to 37.27


Now, to my untrained eye it looks like there are 2 unnecessary free disk partitions 01 and 04. If I look at my old 6.4GB disk with QT parted there are no small free areas so I guess windows doesn't need them (perhaps I'm wrong).

Is it safe to delete the free areas - and if so how?

Do I need to use QTparted to make a boot partition at the start of the drive for a Linux install or will that kill the windows installation?

Any help very gratefully received!!

Alan