New box + reformatting hdb1

[David P. Schwartz]

Good point.

It wasn't clear to me whether there are two drives or one drive with two partitions.  Remember, one drive with two partitions shows up as two devices in windows (and elsewhere).  I was assuming one drive.  If there are two ... then the answer is trivial.  Just bring up fdisk, switch to the 2nd drive delete the partitions, set new partitions, reboot into DOS (I would, just to be safe), and then boot into Linux and let it take things from there.

Come to think of it, I was messing around with Debian 2.2 and seem to recall it was quite happy installing on a FAT32 partition -- in fact, it appeared that it can handle just about any format around.  OTOH, NT4 can't handle FAT32, just FAT16 and NTFS.  So I'm wondering if there isn't a more subtle problem afoot...

-David

dennisk@sahuaro.f2s.com wrote:

> David,
>
> Quite right, you can do it from the command prompt. If I remember the original post correctly he had two hard drives - Windows 98 on the first and the second simply formated FAT32. In that case wouldn't deleting the partition and then letting the Red Hat partition and format to it's liking work?  I think that's what SUSE did when I installed it. Of course, I'm assuming he doesn't want to access the second drive from Windows or that one of the partitions on the second drive would be FAT16.
>
> Dennis Kibbe
>
> Quoting "David P. Schwartz" <davids@desertigloo.com>:
>
> > You don't need to do this from a startup disk.  Just boot to DOS (Start
> > | restart | boot to DOS) then cd to c:\windows\command (if it's not in
> > your path) and run fdisk.  View the partitions (option 4, if I recall).
> > Assuming there are two partitions, you want to delete the second one.
> > It's likely that there is the Primary partition and an Extended
> > partition that contains one or possibly more Secondary partitions.  You
> > need to first delete the Secondary partition if it exists, then delete
> > the Extended partition.  Then you'd just run the regular partitioning
> > tool and grab the rest of the disk space.
> <SNIP>
>