Partition confusion

[Michael Brown]

Greetings All,

I recently installed a new 200GB hard drive in my PC. Previously, I had
2 40GB drives. One partitioned for Windows ME and one partitioned for
Linux (Mandrake/Redhat, whatever the flavor of the week happened to be).
This dual boot system worked great.

The problem now is I can't seem to get the dual boot to work correctly
with a single hard drive.

I have tried several different ways to partition the new drive. I have
been able to install windows and get it setup fine. Then I setup Linux
and all goes well until I have to reboot into windows. Currently,
windows reports an registry error and does not boot not even in safe
mode. Previously, I booted to the startup disk and ran scanreg then it
reports several missing files and instructs me to reinstall windows.

I posted the output of fdisk /dev/hde below:

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hde1   *         1       608   4883728+   c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA) C:
/dev/hde2           609      2432  14651280    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA) D:
/dev/hde3          2433      7722  42491925   85  Linux extended
/dev/hde4          7723     24321 133331467+  83  Linux /archive
/dev/hde5          2433      2675   1951866   83  Linux /
/dev/hde6          2676      2736    489951   82  Linux swap
/dev/hde7          2737      3952   9767488+  83  Linux /usr
/dev/hde8          3953      5168   9767488+  83  Linux /var
/dev/hde9          5169      7600  19535008+  83  Linux /home
/dev/hde10         7601      7722    979933+  83  Linux /tmp

I did use cfdisk to setup this partition scheme. I also ran the command
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 on hde1 and hde2 per man
fdisk. cfdisk originally setup hde3 as type f (win95 ext'd) which caused
windows to "see" a third partition. But, I was able to boot back and
forth to Linux and windows until fsck complained of errors on hde4 and
they were too numerous to repair so I formated the partition again (it
was blank). Then windows could not boot.

Changing hde3 to type 85 (Linux extended) cured the ghost partition
under windows after reformatting C: again.

I should also note that during the current Mandrake 9.2 install lilo
found 2 windows installations. I did delete the windows2 option. But now
while Mandrake boots fine windows does not.

Is this a partitioning issue or perhaps do I need to switch the bootable
flag from hde1 to hde5?

I am hoping there is a simple solution without the need to repartition,
format, reinstall, etc. (again!) But, if I must, I will as long as I
know how to get it right this time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Michael Brown