Dear all,
I have an external hard disk of 80GB. Someone partitioned it in to two, one for windows and another for linux. In my fedora 8 system both the partition is visible with read write option and in windows only the window partition is visible. I now want to departition it. Please suggest how to do that.

What do you mean by
Do you mean you want to remove the windows partition?

yes I want to remove the windows partition..can you help me please....

Just to be sure:

Be careful ! You could destroy all data on disk.

If you are sure you would like to delete a partition you can use fdisk.

Just type

# fdisk /dev/hd?

oder

# fdisk /dev/sd?

and you will get a menu to select what you want.

It`s all very simple.

a) delete the unwanted partition
b) create a new one
c) write the data to the HDD
d) reboot

Finally : BE CAREFUL !

you could use gparted to remove or reformat the partion, and use it in linux.
Or, reinstall linux using the cd, and use the entire disk.

If you would like your drive to remain visible in windows as well then you may want to use the FAT32 filesystem for your external drive.

Use Gparted to do this, a graphical frontend to parted.

I think you are misunderstanding my problem. I want to formate an external hard disk...not the internal one....can you suggest something....thanx in advance....

How to do that. I have no idea about Gparted.

You will find GParted on many Linux "live" CDs and DVDs. It is also available a stand-alone bootable CD.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

I have installed the gparted in my system...in the /dev/sdc it (in gui) is showing two partitions sdc1(file system:ext2) and sdc2 (file system: fat32). I want to make the whole disk fat32 so that it is shown in both windows and linux....how do I do that?

perky.nishi:

Q--"... I want to make the whole disk fat32 so that it is shown in both windows and linux....how do I do that?"--

Comment:

If you format the other drive (ext2) into fat32 this newly formatted partition can be seen by both linux and windows, but the Linux in this space is also erased during formatting.

Anyway you wanted to format the ext2 into fat32, and you have installed Gparted, you can easily do it in GUI. You said it is an external drive, so you don't boot a system on it, right?

Very easy then. Run Gparted, Menu > Admin > Partition Editor
you will need a root pasword being prompted. Then at the GUI click to highlight the partition you wanted to change, the ext2, then right click, Format > fat32, Okay, then Apply. That's it.

Your Gparted has help file read it. Or use Google to learn how to use Gparted.

Hope it helps.

gparted is really not so hard; it is just a matter of clicking things and see what options become available, in your case I would first remove/delete all partitions found on that drive (sdc as you say) click on the green tick that says 'apply', then do a right click on the empty sdc drive and create a FAT32 partition and click on 'apply' again.

use your intuition, after all there is nothing for you to loose on sdc only to gain.

There is an important insight here that is not stated often enough: With very few unlikely exceptions, a computer can not hurt you. If you really try, you can damage the HW but usually the worst you can do is mess up the SW and have to start over again.

But the real problem is that the guy who has done the partition earlier in my external hard disk has done it such a way that it is showing a lock symbol before the disk spaces. So if I right click upon the partitions the formate option is not highlighting. Now if I unmount then the formate option is getting highlighted but when I change it fat32 and apply an error message comes up showing that there is no such device....so what should I do?