windows nested in extended partition???

[themanwhowas]

hi guys,
i have a new problem that ive never even heard of. i have 2 hard drives. 1 western digital (primary) 160gb and a seagate (slave) 40gb. i had windows xp sp2 installed on my WD with 2 partitions; 1 for windows and 1 for my norton ghost images. on the 2nd drive i had mandrake linux installed. after screwing mandrake i had to reinstall it and decided to install it onto my primary hard drive in a dual boot setup with xp. i was going to use the seagate for my ghost images. i did this and it works fine. no problems at all. linux boots ok as does windows. i have partition magic installed and wanted to have a quick look at my partitions. to my suprise my WD was labelled 'bad' and appeared as 1 partition. this is not right so i checked windows disk management. i have the majority of my drive as an extended partition, which is normal for linux. the difference in my case is that my windows partition is also nested inside the extended partition. didnt think that was possible. my ghost drive (which is still currently on my WD) is the only partition that is outside of the extended partition. during mandrake installation i setup the partitions manually so i know that i didnt enclose the windows partition inside linux. what is going on?? is it safe to remove the partitions?? i dont want to have to reinstall windows (for the 9th time) or use ghost to restore a screwed system (for the 4th time). also, as i cant use partition magic, and to be honest, FDISK scares the crap out of me, how will i now delete the extended partition without deleting windows?
thank you

[themanwhowas]

any suggestions would be appreciated

[jmwills]

Thru the disk management tool in the Computer Management Applet.

[themanwhowas]

i cant delete the extended partition from there as there are partitions inside. and would i want to delete it? wouldnt it screw my windows partition?