Strange HDD Problem!

[Muta]

I have an 8.4gb Fujitsu HDD from another PC and a bit ago i partitioned it so i could have a dual boot of win 2k and Linux red hat so i could have a play around with linux and see what its like... anyhow my mum wanted a PC so when it came to partitioning and formatting this drive it would only recognise just over 2gb of it when putting ME on for my mum and wouldnt let me partitiong and format the whole 8.4gb

Any ideas peeps cus im totally flumuxed!!!

[Daniel ~]

You'll need to "F-Disk" and repartition. Remove all non-dos partitions in f-Disk, repartition, then format.

[Muta]

Yeah... thats the thing... i tried that many times and to no avail (sp?)

I just dont understand it :nervous:

[robbie]

Are you using a win98 boot disk to do this?
Rob

[Muta]

Its an ME boot disk as far as i know

[robbie]

ok, when you first start the f-disk program does it ask you if you would like to enable support for large disks?

If I remember correctly, there is some text that you have to read (bout a paragraph long) and then it askes you a yes or no answer.

Rob

[Daniel ~]

From what your saying I think you may have missed a re-boot or failed to snag one partition or another. Try again, I've screwed myself up on this more than once. F-disk and ask to see all existing partitions.

The non Dos partitions, if I remember correctly MUST be removed before the DOS partitions. You may have to recreate you Dos partition, re-boot, the del your non-dos partitions. It's been a while but I seem to remember getting stuck in just such a loop.

[drow_elf]

check your bios settings... you might have it set wrong.... and are does the mobo have a 2gig limit? (note: it may not want to install above 2gb as many comps have problems booting above this range... i dont know if ME can do like win2k and have a boot partition)

[Áedán]

Originally posted by Muta
Any ideas peeps cus im totally flumuxed!!!

Sure thing.

Basically, 95/98/ME FDisk sucks. It can only non-dos partitions when they're primary partitions. If they're logical partitions, it decides it can't see them.

My recommendation? IBM has a lovely little program called "Zap", which wipes the Master Boot Record, and the Partition table. You can download it from the usual service.boulder server.

It's a self extracting archive, so you need to download it to a temporary directory, and then execute it in order to extract the two files inside.

Copy the ZAP.COM file to a bootable disk, and insert the disk in the machine you want to wipe clean. Boot the machine off the disk, and when you get to the DOS prompt, type "ZAP 0" to wipe the first disk.

WARNING: THIS WILL RENDER EVERYTHING ON THE DISK INACCESSABLE.

Once you've done that, you should be able to use fdisk normally, as the HDD will look like a brand new blank disk to it.

AidanII

[Uncle Bob]

Thanks, Adian! I could have used this yesterday! I had a heck of a time getting a partition off an old drive. This works great!

[Kaitain]

Oh, a partition table killer

The last time I tried to remove Linux in favour of Windows (shock, horror) was about 3 years ago. The answer I found at the time was that MS fdisk doesn't understand Linux partitions, but Linux fdisk does.

So the trick was to get a Linux boot disc that was set up to detect the hard drive and any partitions on it (thankfully Red Hat, which is what I was removing, provided this as standard. The images are on their install CDs) and use Linux fdisk to completely remove the Linux partitions. The MS version could then understand what was going on and modify partitions as normal.

I understand that this is still largely the same. Some Windoze programs like PartitionMagic claim to be able to modify Linux partitions - which they can provided you're using only the standard ext2, ext3 and swap partition types. For setups like my own (reiserfs) it still needs Linux to do it.

Anyway, once you've booted from your floppy disc and got a linux console (command prompt) do this to see what partitions you have:

# fdisk /dev/hda

assuming you're talking about the first hard disc. The naming convention is hda is the primary master, hdb is the primary slave, hdc is the secondary master and hdd is the secondary slave.

This brings up the fdisk environment

 Command (m for help):

Type "p" to print the partition table (tells you what partitions are where, and what type they are)

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       184    370912+  83  VFAT
/dev/hda2           185       368    370944   83  Linux
/dev/hda3           369       552    370944   83  Linux
/dev/hda4           553       621    139104   82  Linux swap

Then you want to delete each of the partitions hda2 to hda4. Unlike MS fdisk, changes are not instant.

Type d to delete a partition. It looks like this:

Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 2

Finally write all your changes to disc.

Command (m for help): w

fdisk will automatically exit.

Reboot into MS and see what its fdisk will let you do.

[Áedán]

Originally posted by Kaitain
Oh, a partition table killer
<snip>
I understand that this is still largely the same. Some Windoze programs like PartitionMagic claim to be able to modify Linux partitions - which they can provided you're using only the standard ext2, ext3 and swap partition types. For setups like my own (reiserfs) it still needs Linux to do it.

Actually, Zap takes out the first 128 sectors on the hard disk.

You're also behind the times. Programs like Paragon's Hard Disk Manager support things like FAT/NTFS/Ext2/3, Reiser, HPFS. Yes, it'll even image them intelligently. It also provides Ext2FS/Ext3FS support to WinNT/2000/XP/9x. No Reiser support yet though. Shouldn't be hard under NT, as it supports installable file systems.

AidanII

[Kaitain]

Originally posted by AidanII
You're also behind the times.

That doesn't surprise me

[Áedán]

Originally posted by Kaitain
That doesn't surprise me

No, It always amazes me how much I don't know.