erasing windows
 

G'day from Oz,

I am happy with Ubuntu and have decided to get rid of my XP partition. What is the safest way to do this without crashing boot up and trashing the drive?

Is it as simple as reformating the partition?

Do I need to fiddle with grub to handle the changed partition (i.e. so it doesn't look for XP)?

thanks for your time,

John

If you're using grub or lilo as main boot loader, you can simply format this partition (but if it's a first partition on a hard drive you shoud copy a first 512 bytes of MBR before then restore it after formatting).
If you're using NT loader, you should reformat this partition then install grub.
And before doing anything make a linux boot diskette!

Formatting hda1 into say ext3 shouldn't touch the mbr which is stored outside of this partition.

Cheers.

Would a FAT32 partition be okay as well?

Thanks

John

FAT32 should be OK but if you're not going to be running Windows you'll want to do ext3 or Reiser. Much better, but no Windoze tolerance :) .

FAT32 partitions can be read and written by Linux but EXT3 is a much better choice as it won't suffer from fragmentation like a FAT partition. Linux doesn't even have a de-fragment program -- its not necessary unless you use Microsoft partition formats.

I like the way I said it better. :)

Thank you all for your comments.

I am deleting the xp partition because I successfully run XP through vmware as a virtual machine. Having the FAT32 partition gives me some flexibility to load stuff there that is accessible to both XP and Linux (although I am aware of the recent devekopments with ntfs-3g).

It is just a thought at this stage and a appreciate your feedback.

Regards
John