In preparation for a class in SCO openserver, I installed a red hat linux program from a former class I took in Linux (the CD came with a Thompson Learning book by Dent & Gaddis). I installed this on a Windows machine, and deleted all partitions on the hd. Now I want to get rid of red hat and reinstall windows only on one large partition. The red hat program has many errors and will not boot up correctly, and I'm not interested in fixing it. Fdisk will not allow me to remove any of the partitions. I have two partitions, one small primary DOS partition that is using 1% of disk space. The other is an extended DOS partition using 99%. The active partition is the small one. I assume that these were created by the red hat install, since I deleted all partitions prior to installation. When I tried to delete the extended DOS partition, Fdisk refused to saying that it can't while logical drives exist. When I try to delete logical disks it says that they don't exist! When I try to show logical disks Fdisk says they are not named. When I try to delete the primary DOS partition, it says I have to delete the extended DOS partition first. Now is this being sucked into a worm hole, or what? The only remedy that I can think of is to use Partition Magic or something. Any suggestions short of PM or any ideas about whether PM might work or some sort of shareware? Thanks so much!

I had this problem before. The fdisk Microsoft uses doesn't handle linux partitions at all....its a pain.

What you need to do is get a linux boot disk (or a rescue disk...either/or) and make sure something like diskdruid or cfdisk is on it...

Use that instead of microsoft's fdisk to delete the linux partitions and once that's done you can use microsoft's fdisk to re-allocate anyway you want.

(Although Partition Magic will do the job nicely IF you have it hehe).

Who's fdisk are you using? If it is Linux's fdisk the first thing I would do would be to just boot up with the Windows installation disk and when it installs, it will be only too happy to erase the old Linux installation and take over the whole disk. If you are already trying to use the MSDOS fdisk, then that would be strange and I'm not sure how you handle confront this problem. Especially since Windows uses its own fdisk in the automatic installation process.

A few suggestions:
The later versions of the DOS fdisk have an option where you can delete non-dos partitions that might work.

If your installation CD disk has a rescue mode you can use the linux fdisk to delete the linux partitions.

Use this bootdisk http://www.toms.net/rb/ to boot and use linux fdisk delete the linux partitions.

Thank you all for your help. I finally found a nice person who used Partition Magic to get rid of the partitions and now I have one large partition to install Win. It would not work to install Windows (but perhaps Win XP could since it does some partitioning). Using Linux's own fdisk might have worked, but I couldn't boot up with the CD because CMOS only allowed a C,A or A,C sequence. My linux rescue disk wouldn't work either-maybe because this was only a training program and it didn't have all of the usual utilities.

How to Remove Linux and Install Windows

Ranish Partition Manager