I’m trying to clear my slave drive of linux and since windows and fdisk can’t see it, I’m wondering if there’s a way to remove the partion within windows.
what windows are you using.
my WinXP can see the linux partitions fine 
Alltaken
98se
How did you format your Linux partition? Ext2? Ext3? FAT?
Martin
yea all of those, by mandrake automatic, I installed mandrake on a slave drive and left windows on the master, I read the instruction and being my first time I guess I didn’t do it right, which is remove the partion with diskdrake, reboot to bootdisk and use fdisk /mbr, well, the mbr restore my boot loader but it still fails to see the slave, I even tring disabling the master, but there’s some boot message with a ! before it.
if its a Maxtor, have a look at the utilities at the Maxtor site…
sounds messy, you may have to do a low level format :-?
lilo
oh no I don’t
partition magic rules,… it’s not free though
doesn’t help me any, what about Ghost ? Can diskdrake be access in boot ?
Use your linux installation CD. There should be a way to get to the command line where you can run linux fdisk and delete the partition. Depending on the distro, you could also probably use what ever disk partitioning tool it has do delete the partition. Then you can reboot and go back into windows and it should see empty space that you can partition and format in windows.
I use partition magic but have successfully used diskdruid with my installs. My linux partition is a 20gig maxtar slave and i’v set up with no problems. Personally I do not want my windows patition to be able to access my linux side. There should be a tool on your distro CD for reformating your partitions.
BUT I do want my linux side to access the windows partitiion (this is for security reasons).
In order to facilitate this set up I use lilo to boot up which gives me a linux or dos prompt at boot. To access the windows side from linux the directory /etc/fstab and the directory /mnt must be edited. I use for vim as an editor for that purpose but emacs will work well also. Is that plain?
That’s the way you want it! just edit fstab and /mnt by inserting your desired partitions in those directories and your in contact with your windows aprtition from the linux side. You’ll be safer that way.
If you restore the mbr you will not have access to linux apart from a floppy boot or CD boot disk i believe.
um oxmon, I’m removing my linux from my slave drive, not installing it
I got the impression you just didn’t like the way the install went and were going to try to do a different install configuration.
My mistake - sin loi
Well, I do like it, but my slave drive is only 6 GB and 64 MB of ram, so I don’t have space to experiment with different type of application and I’m still not sure if I could get the modem working, untill I switch over to a bigger Hard Drive with more ram so I can be confident that it works.
…hmmm sounds like enough space to me and then some. noprob. to each his own.
but a word of encouragement for you. don’t let the penguin spook you. his beak only looks mean 
If your going to do some hardware changing to accomodate linux there are some awesome sites on the www to help you along. google is your friend. AND for the sake of your sanity don’t get some kind of winmodem. Let me know when your ready to take the plunge and I’ll help if I can. And don’t forget to check out
http://www.basiclinux.net/index.html
good luck.
hmm, why don’t just just get a distro on liveCD (linux that runs FROM a bootable cd) …then you just put it in, reboot, and you can do/fix whatever you’d like. …knopix is one of the most known linux liveCDs …but i think gentoo’s livecd (which is usually used to install gentoo) would be more then enough - you’ll need only the console anyway 
hey hook - right on! I didn’t even think of that option. A lot of the folks on #blt are using gentoo and knoppix to ease into linux.
Thanks, but I got this linmodem at linuxvoodoo and it claim it’s linux compatable, so
Ok, I was able to delete the partion with Debian, but I had to write it an able to keep it that way, so now I’m left with one partion but still no notice from fdisk or windows.
I don’t understand it… if you deleted the partition you should be able to see it with windows fdisk simply as free space on your hard drive…
Anyway, with SuSE I could easilly solve that kind of problems, by going to manual installation and just reformating the ext2 (or whatever…) partition as fat32… If Debian can do this (which I’m sure it can…), this is the way to deal with it…
Good luck AlCapone…