bad partition or is it?

[daven1986]

Hi, when i look at one of my drives in partition magic it says the drive data is bad. however when i tried to install linux it said:

these are partitions on my drive:

/hdb5/ starts from sector 0 and goes to sector X format NTFS
/hdb6/ starts from sector X and goes to sector Y format extended
/hdb6a/ starts from sector Y and goes to sector Y format NTFS

does this mean if i format hdb6 to ext3 then i can install linux on this? i want to keep hdb5 intact. should i remove hdb6a too then merge the two?

thanks

daven

 

[daven1986]

i was just going to add that the drive is accessible in windows, and that says it is NTFS format.

ok so in the install i will delete both those partitions then make a new one in their place.

this shouldn't harm hda5 though should it? the reason i ask is i have no practical way of backing up 70gb of data. none of it is really important though.

thanks

daven