Do I have a weird/scary rootkit buried in my W2k partition table?

[downwitch]

I've been trying to move/resize partitions on an HDD using PartitionMagic 8.0, but it keeps telling me my partition table is bad, etc. etc.

While I'm aware that there are some errors that just occur, by scanning the same HDD using Partition Table Doctor I see a pretty disturbing thing:

in the only formatted drive I'm really using (you'll see a couple of other partitions, but they're not in use at the moment really, mostly there from tinkering trying to fix this), I see this Linux drive with a garbage name appear. I have never installed Linux, though I did run Knoppix once or twice back in the day when fixing a hardware problem.

Is this some kind of malware/rootkit thing, or is it normal? I can't delete just the weird Linux bit without losing the whole partition along with it. Is there something I can do to get rid of it without losing the logical partition?

See attached screenprint. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[TwoRails]

Hi downwitch,

Welcome to PC Mechanic !!

Sure looks like a corrupt partition to me. I don't think I'd worry about losing 7 MB though. The proper thing to do, however, would be to image all your valid partitions, reformat, and reinstall image backups.

HTH

TwoRails

[downwitch]

Thanks for the reply.

If these are just data partitions, can I just move the valid data off them and reformat? I'd rather not preserve any ghost-baddies in the image.

[TwoRails]

Sure