🚀 go-pugleaf

Can someone please offer an intelligent suggestion to the following?:

I have somehow managed to (apparently) corrupt a partition table or
soemthing else relavent to the disk drive which is a 2.1GB Western
Digital Caviar... as spec'd as hdb below:

ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf
hda: IBM-DAQA-33240, 3098MB w/96kB Cache, LBA, CHS=787/128/63
hdb: WDC AC22100H, 2014MB w/128kB Cache, LBA, CHS=1023/64/63, DMA
 ...

...hmm... just now noticing the DMA (not sure if relavent)

Anyway it is setup as a slave on a PPro MB with nothing but Linux
partitions:

Disk /dev/hdb: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot   Begin    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1            1        1     1023  2062336+   5  Extended
/dev/hdb5            1        1       26    52353   83  Linux native
/dev/hdb6           27       27      280   512032+  83  Linux native
/dev/hdb7          281      281      319    78592+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hdb8          320      320      523   411232+  83  Linux native

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
(Reboot to ensure the partition table has been updated.)
Syncing disks.
Re-read table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy. <<===
Reboot your system to ensure the partition table is updated.

Please note the second to the last line "Re-read failure".

The problems are two-fold:

1) DOS FDISK hangs with this disk connected to the MB. It won't
   even show anything! It just basically hangs the system upon
   attempted execution.

2) I can read and write partitions to this disk under LINUX, but
   (here's the kicker) I cannot delete the last partition that 
   was created under LINUX. In order to do so, I must first create
   a dummy partition (so the dummmy becomes the _last_ created
   partition) which then allows me to delete all other partitions
   (with the exception of the extended partition which you cannot
   delete until _all_logical partitions are deleted!

The data does not appear damaged on the existing partitions (that
have data on them). And the one active linux partitions seems to
boot (using boot floppy) with no trouble.

I would like to start backing up some data onto this disk, but I
am obviously reluctant until I can resolve this problem.

I think I may have created this original partition table running
fdisk with Linux booted under umsdos from the other disk (hda -
which has Win95 and NT partitions on it). But this should be of
no consequence assuming the fdisk program runs the same as it would
from an ext2 partition (which is how I formatted the hdb partitions).

I first realized I had this problem when I tried editing this disk's
partition table from a Pentium Motherboard. I have since re-installed
into the machine that created the partition. Nothing funny about
trying to write/read partitions from different motherboard controllers
I hope?! 

I don't believe I did anything stupid like run disk utilities
such as (e2fsck, mke2fs) after an fdisk write, but prior to a
reboot, but who knows what happened at this point?

If anyone has some _sound_ suggestions (which don't need to be
run from a DOS utility) I sure would appreciate some help.

TIA-

--Steve Cahill