I've been having trouble with using Puppy's partitioning utility, Pdisk, which I believe is simply a shell for fdisk and cfdisk.

The first time I tried to use it, I found that the files that had been in the old partitions were still in the new ones! I was used to cfdisk formatting the drives for me. So, I downloaded bootnuke and let my computer have 16 hours of alone time. Now both hard drives were clean as a whistle. Incidentally, I recommend against the Gutmann wipe for time reasons.

So, I booted up my empty computer with the Puppy LiveCD and tried creating three partitions on the 6Gig (Yes, that's right. It's called old hardware.) hard drive, leaving the other one alone. One was 2000 MB and was a Linux type. Another was 2000 MB and was FAT 32 for the Windows 95 I intend to run. The last was what space I had left (roughly 2000 MB) and was set to Linux Swap.

Trouble was, I couldn't mount the hard disk. Now, the next time I restarted puppy, it registered as having the additional memory from swap, but I was unable to mount the hard drive or any of it's partitions! I noticed that during boot it was trying to mount them, but saying that it was unable for one reason or another. I tried reformatting the partition table using plain ol' fdisk, occasionally varying the sizes and/or types of the various partitions, but to no avail.

This is frustrating as I'd like to run Puppy from the hard disk. Any ideas what's going on?

Update: I found a helpful page at http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HardDriveInstall .
I think all I need to do is run mkfs and I should be good- I'll keep the community posted on how it turns out.

Formatting seperate from partitioning- who new? Is this normal to Linux? I used to use slackware, and I could have sworn cfdisk automatically formated my partitions. Ah well. You live you learn.

Sounds like you have a handle on the basic process. But I would question the need for a 2000MB swap partition as well as its position on the disk. I've been advised that as a general rule of thumb that swap should be no more than twice your physical RAM. For example a machine with 128MB RAM would get a 256MB swap partition. I've pushed this to 3 or 4 times RAM but have been told that doing so could lead to problems with and premature failure of the hard drive. Ideally, if I were going to dual boot Puppy and Win.95 I would set up the swap as Partition hda1 of 250 to 500MB, Partition hda2 linux ext2 or 3 file system of 2 to 2.5GB for Puppy and partition hda3 the balance of the drive for win95 formatted FAT16/32 - Check to make sure your choosen file system is compatible with Win95 before you set it up and remember that Windows should be installed first. Good luck and let us know how you come out.