Hi,

I currently dual boot Mandrake 10.1 Official with Win 2K....however it has been about 6 months since I last bothered to boot into Win2K. Time to remove it methinks.

Is it possible to remove Windows by simply rm *.* in the windows partitions via linux.

Also, can I then 'merge' these partitions with my existing home partition - i dont want to have more than my root and home partitions ideally.

For example.

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 5.7G 2.2G 3.3G 41% /
/dev/hda8 3.6G 1.2G 2.5G 32% /home
/dev/hda1 7.0G 1.9G 5.1G 27% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hda5 15G 2.0G 13G 14% /mnt/win_d

Remove contents of hda1 and hda5 - then merge hda1 and hda5 with hda8 resulting in something like the following:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 5.7G 2.2G 3.3G 41% /
/dev/hda8 21.8G 1.2G 20.6G 32% /home

Or am I asking for the equivalent of the moon on a stick here?

Thanks for any info.

You could do this but not without data loss

You would want to redoo the parttions with home and the windows parttions. Backing up data that you would want to keep.

Looks like "moon on a stick" to me.

The problem is that /home is not contiguous physical space with win_c and win_d.

Your hard drive is currently something like this:

-----------------------------------
| win_c | win_d | / | swap | /home |
-----------------------------------

based on the "hda?" names. As you can see, you have your root partition (and I assume a swap partition (/dev/hda7)) between your Windows partitions and your /home. There is no way to "merge" them like that.

Your best bet, to fully use your hard disk, is to save everything, and then delete all partitions, set them up new, and reinstall/restore.

Rather than reinstall you could reformat the windows partitions as linux ones (using ext3, or whatever) and then mount them in your home directory eg as /home/pwilkie/sparespace and /home/pwilkie/mp3s. Remember, partitions can be mounted just about anywhere, not just at / or /mnt
Hope this helps.

tredegar's suggestion is the way I prefer to do it - mount points are just that.
Simple, it works, little chance of screwing up and losing data.

Winner all round.