Re: Can't fdisk drive

[Chris Watt <grimm mad scientist com>]

At 04:06 PM 5/26/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I need to run fdisk on a drive that had Redhat installed, but Fdisk
>won't let me delete the partition. Any ideas? (I don't want to buy
>Partition Magic.)
>thanks,

It depends to a large extent on which fdisk you're using. M$ fdisk is (in
my experience) frequently unable to comprehend linux partitioning, meaning
that even on a hdd with a perfectly good partition table it is sometimes
necessary to use the linux fdisk (you can do this without an active linux
installation or any deep knowledge of boot disk creation, just boot from
the Redhat setup disk, start a new installation and progress just as far as
the bit where it asks you to setup partitions, start fdisk and delete your
old partitions, write the changes and exit ("w") and then reboot your machine.
If you're finding that the linux fdisk doesn't work this probably implies
that either the drive is physically damaged or (more likely) it has a bad
partition table. In this case I have found that the best approach is to use
a low-level tool like Norton Disk Editor to zero out the first couple of
cylinders of the disk drive, and then fdisk the (now partitionless) disk,
this may not always work but I've brought a few drives back from the dead
in this fashion.

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