[prior comments deleted] I'm responding to my own last comment. I ran the parted update that corrects the partition table such that parted does not report a partition table error. See... http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/05/fhassel_windows_not_booting91.html Parted does report the following message... "Using /dev/hda Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is 77557/16/63. Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 503.999M." Inside parted, the print command reports partition table with the extended partition as "lba, type=0f". I had set the drive in the BIOS to LBA rather then AUTO as was previously. Parted seems to know the raw drive geometry and appears to report the extended drive correctly. It is a bit confusing to see the raw drive parameters reported but not the LBA parameters. Is all ok? Does parted have an option for more detail about partitions? I'll try to look that up at gnu.org. Some notes about the patch and fix: 1. It has a perl script that runs the update. I don't know Perl as of now but someone on the list may want to look it over. 2. A replacement library, libparted-1.6.so.0.0.6, is loaded. I'm wondering now about other sources of parted like knoppix, the SUSE install disks are obviously problematic. I'll have to check parted's development page to find if this is a general fix or just SUSE specific. My utility disks will have to be redone. Does this complete the story?