Formatting a Linux partiton to recover space

[Trenta Angelo]

Hi all,

I???ve a Pentium3 with 64 Mb of Ram and an HD of 4.3 Gb.
I???ve one partition of 1 Mb with Linux Mandrake 7.1,
And disk C: of 2.92 Gb, with Windows 98 as OS.

I would like to install Windows 2000 and Oracle,
in a single partition of 4.3 Gb,
but I???m not able to format Linux partition.
I can login as Root, but there is a graphical interface that I don???t know well.

Thanks in advance, Angelo.

[Santosh Nair_1]

It sounds like you're trying to get rid of your Linux partition right? You should be able to repartition the drive from the Windows 2k install screen and use the whole disk for Windows 2K.

-Santosh

[I_M]

Hi

If your problems are such as
* can not erase LILO in MBR
* can not clear linux partition

Boot up your system from Linux partition and overwrite your MBR (first 512byte of the disk)using "dd".
If you want to erase whole information on the disk, # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your-disk bs=512 count=1
**YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!**

After reboot, all the partition information and LILO should be gone.

Regards,
masanari iida

[Eugen Cocalea · Accepted solution]

Hi,

If you want to make only one partition and install W2k and Oracle on it, boot from the W2k install disk and you will partition and format the disk on the fly.

If you want first to partition your disk, use fdisk from whether linux or windows, erase the old partitions, make a new one from the whole disk and reboot. You then have to format the disk but it's somehow useless since you will have to reformat it for installing w2k.

E.

[Eugen Cocalea]

Hi again,

You also want to run

fdisk /mbr

from a DOS/Wxx prompt, to clear the MBR of the disk - no more lilo (if it is in the MBR). If it's not in the MBR, repartitioning and formating will destroy it anyway.

E.