When partitioning a drive with fdisk it asks whether I want to enable large disk support cuz windows cannnot see bigger than 2 megs or something like that, If i am going to install linux on it does it matter? also when formatting it only formats the 2 megs what happens to the data on the rest of the disk??

Are you using DOS fdisk or Linux's? I don't recall the Linux fdisk ever asking about large disk support, and I've had no end of headaches with the DOS fdisk utility.

Dos fdisk.

Yeah, I'd suggest using the fdisk (or cfdisk) that comes with Linux. If you have or can get ahold of a bootable CD or floppy, you should be able to do it from there. Most Linux install discs can even do it - just get up to the point where you can partition, do the partitioning, then quit the installer (I've had to use that more than once on broken Windows installations).

Last time I used the DOS/Windows fdisk, it resulted in an imaginary partition that Windows thought was there, though it actually wasn't (since there was no physical way for an extra 4GB partition to be on that drive). In times past, I've had it totally unable to remove a partition - it'd say "cannot remove extended partition while logical drives exist", and then, trying to delete logical drives, "no logical drives exist." It is a bad, bad program

It is a good idea to always keep a linux live CD around. I have KNOPPIX and Gentoo with me all the time in case of any emergencies.

Yea, I should have knoppix handy.
I was trying to install peanut linux but it kept crashing I thought i had something to do with the partitioning cuz fdisk was showing 3 partitions, one of them was only 16kb and i could not delete it or do anything to it but there might be a hardware issue, i was trying to install it on a 350 mghz, amd. 192 mb mem and a 8 gig hd but the cdrom is a 4X and is 11 years old. eek!!! it started to install but kept crashing. I was just playing around with it, maybe ill pickup a new cdrom tomorrow and give another try.