Hard Disk Partitioning

First, what are you attempting to do with the extended partition?

If you are trying to add space to the C drive, you will need to use a partition manager such as Partition Magic. Unless you want to wipe the contents from the C drive and start over.

Then, there are 2 possabilities as to why you cannot access the extended partition from fdisk.
1 is that you have the wrong version of fdisk for the way the drive was set up.
2 it is more likely, that the drive was setup with overlay software such as Easy-Drive.

There are numerous Tech Rebuplic articles dealing with partition and recovery. I suggest that you read through them.

If you are willing to wipe the drive completely, run fdisk with the mbr switch (fdisk /mbr) this will give you a new master boot record, and clear any problems with the partition table.

Aslo, check out the resources at www.f-disk.com
and the partitioning section at www.aumha.org

If the extended space is formatted then it is labeled as a logical drive
Boot the computer with startup disk,any driver letter other than C:\ such as D: will be the logical drive
At Command Prompt,type FDISK
Choose to view the drive information,it will show the drive partitions
Press ESC,then choose to delete the logical drive in extended partition
Press ESC and again choose to delete the extended partition,be persistant if it does not work the first time try it again

Download the Zap utility from IBM's hard drive support area. This utility will completely kill any bogus (or leftover) partition information and allow you to rebuild the drive correctly. I agree that it sounds as if the drive was previously partitioned using an overlay program. These modified partitions are extremely difficult to remove using without the orginal program to uninstall.

Zap can be downloaded at http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm

The easiest solution is a third party software like partition magic. Usually they can move partitions around without loosing data.

Fdisk will work when done in the correct order. first delete logical partitions (or dirves),
next delete the extended partition,
(if you have a secondary partition, delete it now)
next delete the primary partion.

Now create a primary partition with the maximum size.

(If you are still using DOS 6, maximum partition sixe is about 2 gig. Create an extended partition, and create logical partitions on it)