windows fdisk crash --can't recover windows

[Ben Luey <lueyb@gridley.ACNS.Carleton.edu>]

A friend wanted to dual boot with linux and her already installed windows
98. She installed Mandrake 7.0, but it was the early version with the
buggy resize in DiskDrake and so her windows partition got destroyed in
the resizing. Now we can't get windows fdisk is work to put her windows
back. I've tried booting with a linux rescue disk and deleting all the
partitions. Rebooting, but when I delete add or view partitions in windows
fdisk (two different versions) it just hangs. I tried making a win95 32bit
partition (full size, 8gig) in linux and that works. I can copy files, but
windows won't see it. I did fdisk /mbr and no luck. I made a 1gig dos
partition and formated it, no dice.

By default the hard drive is sectors=63, cylinders=1099 heads=64. I went
to the bias and saw a second configuration with heads=15 and tons of
cylinders. I repeated all the above sets with linux fdisk with those hd
settings, but still no luck. This is a new sony lapton and I get do a hard
drive wipe from the bias. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ben