Formating a Linux hard-drive to FAT32
 

Hello friends!

Heres the situation:

I have 2 80gb hard-drives, one with windows XP, and one with Redhat 9 installed. I decided to remove Redhat from this machine, and used the linux rescue program to remove the partitions on the Linux hard-drive. Then i reseted my mbr with fdisc, removing LiLO.

Still, the Linux hard-drive seem to have the Linux file system, and therefore my windows installation can't read it. Therefore, I want to format the former Linux drive into the FAT32 filesystem, as it was before I installed Redhat :)

BUT, since I am a Linux newb, I don't know how to do that, and FDisk dosent seem to find that Linux hard-drive at all.

What should I do?

thx for any replies:)

plz need answers:))

Powerquests Partition Magic enables you to delete create, resize partitions - try that.

try

fdisk /mbr

to clear the master boot record.

And then proceed.

Good luck.

Deleting Linux
 

Microsoft's fdisk will not be able to recognize the Linux file systems.

You can format the entire hard disk using the Windows CD.
You can also use the RedHat CD. Format the entire disk in vfat and reboot before the installation begins.

If I'm not mistaken, sliz wants to remove linux from the machine.

Now I'm not sure about XP, but with win98 you could boot to the win98 startup disk (assuming you have one, or can get one) and once booted into dos, you do an a:\fdisk /mbr, then fdisk and make your partitions, reboot, format, you're ready to go.

XP may be more complicated.

regards...

The 98se boot floppy has problems removing Linux partitions - after using it to delete my main ext3 partitons I was left with a logical partition inside an extened partiton - I couldnt delete this - strangely when I created a primary dos partiton it gave me the option of using the whole drive again - I then just

Format c: /s

and things proceded as normal

ok, I will try that:)
thx again Linux-gurus ;)

I used the windows XP cd to format that hard-drive, and it worked out quite nicely:)

Windows XP can not format FAT32 any higher than 32 gigabytes. You have use a format utility from earlier OS versions like Win88 to format 80 gigabytes.

fdisk /mbr will only work if you don't have any viruses in the mbr or you are using special drivers to recognize drive. You have to use special software to remove the virus and then do fdisk /mbr.

Logical drives lives in extended partitions.