The Magical Ghost Partition

aka What the hell's this computer doing?

Well, not *this* computer.

A friend of a friend dumped her old computer on me cause she got a new
one and saw no need to have an old extra one lying about.  Personally,
I can't understand that, but that's just me. :-)  (Even got the
monitor.)

I'm actually kinda excited cause a) I can put Win95 on it for that
stuff that won't work on the really old computer with Win3.1 on it,
and also won't work well with XP.  b) I can use the old scanner with
it cause it takes an ISA slot.  Cool.  (Never mind that it's a Packard
Bell.  Hey, it was free.  I was shocked my 95 found drivers for
everything, cause her Recovery Disk has some, er, gouges in it.)

It was supposedly busted, but this woman is such a complete illiterate
that I can't trust a thing she says, including her translations from
the shop she took it to, etc.  So far I've found the CD drive to have
a problem, but everything else working OK *thus far*.  And I had
another CD drive to use.

Except for this slightly weird thing.  It has a ghost.  

I discovered there was a second hard drive on it (a weird 5.25" thing
I've never seen?) and it was all partioned up.  So after I installed
Windows and did a few other things... suddenly it tries to tell me
nothing is on the I partition -- the CD, just to discover it has
created an I partition and the CD is now on J.  So where the hell did
this partition come from?

Furthermore, it's duplicating everything from the E partition.  I
noticed it was the same size, and then when I installed something on E
last night, it's also showing up as being on this I.  <Twilight Zone
music>  It's showing up in Explorer in alphabetical order.  I went
into fdisk for the hell of it, and it's showing as being on the 1st
hard drive, right behind C.  And of course, there's not that much
space on the 1st drive -- it can't really be there.  I have not
actually tried to go to that partition and see if that program will
run from there.  (Windows seems to *think* it's there.)

I can't think of anything else important I did, cause this thing
showed up not long after I installed Windows.  The only thing I
might've done was format a couple more of the partitions.  Wait, I'm
trying to think.  One of the partitions on the 2nd drive was primary,
so I went in fdisk and re-partitioned it, and then of course the D
drive moved.  I can't remember if that was before or after I installed
Windows, but shouldn't have affected the 1st drive anyway.

What would cause this, and how do I get rid of this extra partition
that doesn't exist?  I thought about getting rid of it with fdisk.
I've only installed one program, so I don't mind just wiping
everything except the C drive.  I'm just not sure if I'll screw it up
worse and maybe I should wipe everything and start over?  Is this an
unusual thing or am I just now having the honor of seeing it for the
first time?


--

Erimess Dragon  
 -==(UDIC)==-          

d++e+NT++Om UK!1!2!3!A!L!                   
U+uCuFuG+++uLB+uA+ nC+nH+nP+nS++nT-xa2
--------
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as 
adults enjoy adultery?
--George Carlin Mumblings