Sorry, Im sure this question has been asked before, but through searching this forum, and google, I couldnt find the answer to my situation. I am going to try and explain my situation as clear as possible.

I have linux mandrake 9.0 on my computer. I want to install windows 98 on it as well (for various reasons). At first I just wanted mandrake, so I installed mandrake by itself on my hard drive. I have no floppy drive, just a CD rom and a CD burner.

What do I have to do??? lol. The reason I am so frustrated is because every piece of info I find on uninstalling mandrake assumes that there is partitions with windows on them, or another hard drive on the pc with windows on it. Plus every tutorial I can find that describes how to dual boot with windows and mandrake assumes that you already have windows installed.

I have tried a few things, including booting from a windows CD and using fdisk. But that didnt work, cause any option I would try, fdisk would just freeze. When I booted in fdisk, it could only read "A:" (other then D and E which are my burner and cd rom).

Another problem I have, is my lack of experience with linux (or mandrake to be more specific). So please be newbie friendly if you are kind enough to reply. If I didnt supply enough information, just tell me what else you need to know. thanks a bunch.

well

Boot into Mdk, become root, go to a terminal,
run fdisk /dev/hda (assuming it's an ide disk)
and from there use p to display your partition
scheme and then d (repeatedly) to delete them
all one by one. If you don't know fdisk well
enough, use m for help.
When finished deleting do w<enter> and reboot,
eh voila, all gone ;)

Cheers,
Tink

Make sure you back up important data to one of your partitions first.

hot damn. LOL. thanks guys. I'll try that right away. much appreciation.

you said "windows as well" - as you want both Mdk and Win you can try to install win98 without deleting mandrake if you have sufficient empty disk space. I am fairly sure that Windoze does not require the 1st physical partition. Linux partitons are condesceningl ignored by Win.

Windows does bitch and moan when it doesnt get /dev/hda1 or C: unless its Windows2000

oh yeah... and then it just eats up the MBR... chews up LILO and spits it out :-(

windows 2nd will replace MBR (nee LILO), but there are workarounds. e.g. - I always LILO-boot from diskette so the hard drive MBR is never an issue

True, windows does not need to be on the 1st partition but it needs to be a primary and when you set the boot flag on the paritition windows will id this c:.

Windows fdisk can delete non dos partitions. Delete all partitions and create a DOS partition with the size you desire. Then install windows 98. MDK will install to the unallocated area of the disk.

You can also boot the 1st CD to rescue mode. Use linux fdisk to wipe out disk and start installing as above. It is possible to create partitions for the entire install at this time but a somewhat difficult task for the newbie.

I dont have windows on my computer, and as I said in the opening thread, unfortunately, when I use windows fdisk from the CD, it only reads "A:" and whenever i try and do anything it just freezes and I have to reboot.

But as for using linux fdisk, I am a bit confused... *sorry, I am a real newbie at this* But I went into my terminal and did 'whereis fdisk' it gives me this

[me]$ whereis fdisk
fdisk: /sbin/fdisk /usr/share/man/man8/fdisk.8.bz2

But when I go to either /sbin/fdisk or /usr/share/man/man8/ and try and run fdisk, it says

bash: fdisk: command not found

So I am assuming that means fdisk isnt working properly?

All I really want to do is get linux off my system, and install windows 98. From there I can follow one of the many tutorials and install mandrake again. So if anyone could (sorry) walk me through the steps on how to get mandrake off my system, and put me in a situation where I could install windows 98, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks much.

did you switch to root?
at prompt type:

su

<then enter root passwd>


alternatively you could log out and log in as 'root'

for michaelk:

you can have 4 primary partitions per drive - if your 1st primary is (e.g.) linux and 2 (e.g.) is Win95 FAT16 and marked bootable, Wimdows should call it C: and work fine. "bootable" is for the DOS/Wizdows loader and should not affect linux/lilo/grub.

Moroccan
have you tried /sbin/fdisk? Apparently your PATH does not contain /sbin or "."

You should understand that the order of installation is not important because the procedure for dealing with this is essentially the same as recovering from "can not boot linux (or windows)" - which will probably be a future post from you.

Have you tried to install Wigdows? I do not recall, but it might allow you to repartition.
If you are unable to fdisk from linux/dos-diskette/windows-install, and can not "low-level" format the drive, try this: Reinstall Linux from CD. At some point, it will ask you about installing on the hard drive, with options for "entire drive" and "format drive". Say yes to both. After format, immediately end the installation and you should have a clean drive. And then, Wicdows can be installed as your FIRST partition - make sure you leave room for Linux

Okay, i dont knwo if this helps.. but I got fdisk to work... now the dev/hda isnt working... ( sorry to be so pathetic, but here is what happened to me...

[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk p

Unable to open p
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# cd fdisk
bash: cd: fdisk: Not a directory
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk dev/hda

Unable to open dev/hda
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk dev/hda1

Unable to open dev/hda1
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk dev/hda6

Unable to open dev/hda6
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# dir
addpart hotplug MAKEDEV quotaoff
agetty hwclock managerpm quotaon
arp ifcfg mii-tool rarp
arping ifconfig mingetty reboot
askrunlevel ifdown minilogd remadmin
badblocks ifenslave mkbootdisk rescuept
blockdev ifup mkdosfs resize2fs
chkconfig init mke2fs rmmod
clock initlog mkfs rmmod.static
consoletype insmod mkfs.bfs rmt
convertquota insmod-DIET mkfs.ext2 route
ctrlaltdel insmod_ksymoops_clean mkfs.minix routef
debugfs insmod.static mkfs.msdos routel
delpart install-info mkfs.vfat rtacct
depmod installkernel mkinitrd rtmon
devfs-add-mouse-entry ip mkrescue runlevel
devfsd ipmaddr mkswap sash
dhcpcd iptables modemconf service
dnsconf iptables-restore modinfo setsysfont
dosfsck iptables-save modprobe sfdisk
dumpe2fs iptunnel nameif shutdown
e2fsck ipvsadm nash slattach
e2label ipvsadm-restore netconf sln
elvtune ipvsadm-save netreport sulogin
ether-wake kallsyms nologin swapoff
fdisk kbdrate pam_console_apply swapon
fixperm kernelversion pam_tally sysctl
fsck killall5 partx syslogd
fsck.ext2 klogd pidof tc
fsck.ext3 ksyms pivot_root telinit
fsck.minix ldconfig plipconfig tune2fs
fsconf lilo portmap unix_chkpwd
fuser linuxconf poweroff update
genksyms losetup ppp-watch userconf
getkey lsmod pwdb_chkpwd vregistry
halt mailconf quotacheck
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# cd fdisk
bash: cd: fdisk: Not a directory
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk m

Unable to open m
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk -m
fdisk: invalid option -- m

Usage: fdisk [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK Change partition table
fdisk -l [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK List partition table(s)
fdisk -s PARTITION Give partition size(s) in blocks
fdisk -v Give fdisk version
Here DISK is something like /dev/hdb or /dev/sda
and PARTITION is something like /dev/hda7
-u: give Start and End in sector (instead of cylinder) units
-b 2048: (for certain MO disks) use 2048-byte sectors
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4866 cylinder s
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id S ystem
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 1 1247 10016496 83 L inux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 1248 4866 29069617+ 5 E xtended
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 * 4867 4867 0 e W in95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 1248 1297 401593+ 82 L inux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 1298 4866 28667961 b W in95 FAT32
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]# fdisk dev/hda1

Unable to open dev/hda1
[root@cpe00055df387a8-cm014110216098 sbin]#

cfdisk...