Remove Win dual boot?

[Dennis Kibbe]

On Saturday 25 February 2006 06:14, mike enriquez wrote:
> 			Got a newbie question here for some of you?
> I want to remove windows from my dual boot computer. How can I do this
> without messing up my Red Hat WS.
> Any help would be appreciated.
> Thanks.
> Mike Enriquez
> el newbie  :)

Hi Mike,

Funny, I was talking to Hans Reiser just the other day about doing exactly 
that.  He was a speaker at SCaLE 4+.

Here are the issues you'll face.

1.  The MBR is most likely on the WIndows partition.  You can run cfdisk (or 
fdisk) as root to see what partiton is marked bootable.  If it is then you'll 
want to leave the partiton.

2.  You can resize the Windows partition down, but you won't be able to move 
the Linux partition into the resulting space (or. at least, no easily) unless 
EXT3 is different than ReiserFS.

The safest thing to do is to remove as many programs and as much data from the 
Windows partition as you can, then run Disk Cleanup, Scandisk and defrag.  
Then you can resize the Windows partition down as low as it will go plus 
about 512MB so Windows as some elbow room to boot.  You can use the latest 
KNOPPIX disk to do this.

Next create a new partiton in the free space and mount it as whatever you like 
(/data, /extra. etc.) so Red Hat can use it.

One person I talked to at SCaLE always sets up computers using LVM so resizing 
is a trivial thing.  I don't know if you'd have that option now.  [Anyone 
care to comment?]

Or the easiest thing to do might be to wait for the next major Red Hat 
release, backup your data and then do a fresh install.

Dennisk