Re: Oh what a DUMMY I AM, Oh what a DUMMY I AM!

[Chris Kloiber <chris_kloiber suth com>]

"S.E. Dalziel" wrote:
> 
>         My 8 gig hard drive crashed last weekend, so I reformatted it all as
> one partition. As I was waiting for the format to get finished, I
> SPOTTED MY COPY OF R.H. 6.1 by Linux/Mandrake. Once my drive was

A correction here. Red Hat 6.1 is not produced by Mandrake.

> formatted, I loaded up Linux, and gave my whole 8 gig drive to Linux.
> It set up, ran and found everything. At the end of the weekend, I
> tried to take a look at my hard drive to see how it was set up. It
> couldn't read it. I tried to reformat my drive, and the best I could
> get was 4 gig. I tried to use Fdisk, and it keeps telling me that
> there is still a logical partition and I try to delete that, and
> Fdisk said there is no logical partition.
>         How do I get rid of it and get my 8 gig drive back?? What I want to
> do is run both Win 98 and Linux when I get this taken care of. I will
> allow both systems 4 gigs. I figure that should be enough.
> 
>         Regards;
> 
>         Steve
> 
>         Oh what a DUMMY I AM, Oh what a DUMMY I AM, Oh what a DUMMY I AM

Try restarting the installer. If it is Red Hat 6.1, type 'text expert'
at the BOOT: prompt (Mandrake may have similar options) If it asks for a
driver disk, hit cancel. Pollow the prompts until you get to the choice
of Disk Druid or Fdisk. Select Fdisk. Choose your 8 gig drive to work
with, and you will be deposited at a black and white screen which will
near the bottom say 'press 'm' for menu'. Play with this all you want,
but the upshot is to hit the letter 'o' <enter> then 'w' <enter>. Then
your partition table is truly empty. Turn off your machine and restart
with the OS of your choice. BTW- if you are going back to a windows
world, use 'fdisk /mbr' from a dos floppy just in case LILO is still
installed.

Chris Kloiber