Experts. do me a favor?
I have Linux sever system. I am going to reformat to use Window Version of Microsoft. During booting of server, I can not boot by floppy disk with windows system disk to format the HDD. it goes directly to Linux server sequence without stopping.
How can I format this HDD?

Thanks

yes that's cos u cannot remove linux. it's for u'r own good. it knows the evil that u r about to put u'r computer through, so it won't let u.

but if u must:

- go into u'r bios and ensure that u'r first boot device is the floppy
drive.

- then boot with the disk in and run fdisk /MBR at the prompt.

then u may continue u'r evil way. i refuse to add ne more.

This tutorial assumes that you have just one physical hard drive and it is connected as Master on the Primary IDE controller. If this is not the case, then don't do this...


Easy,

boot back into linux one last time and do this:

1) Login as root
2) open a term (if necessary)
3) Run "fdisk /dev/hda"
4) Hit "p" to print out the existing partition table
5) Hit "d" to delete the existing partitions. Do this until all of them are deleted.

The next two steps are optional

6) Now hit "n" to create a new partition. fdisk will ask what type of partition that you want, hit "p" for primary. Next, it will ask you what partition number to use, hit "1". Next it will provide a default location for the start of the partition, use it. Then it will provide a default ending location, use it.

If you did step 6, then you have to do step 7.

7) Hit "t" to change the partition type, select "1" for partition #1, then pick "b" for FAT32.

This step is not optional

8) Say to yourself "Poor Linux, I barely knew ye" and hit "w".

Congratulations, you have now blasted your HD back into the DOS age


Fire up Windows and either use the partition that you created in linux, or if you didn't do step 6, create a new partition using FDISK.EXE


Does this mean that we can still be friends?


John

rootboy, don't you need to unmount all the partitions before you format those?

___________________________________________
Windows is by far, the most used operating system
with more than 100 million installations worldwide.
Linux fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches
are far more numerous than humans and that numbers
alone do not denote a higher life form.

Actually, we never did get to formatting. That would come after he sets up his partitions in Windows.

As for changing the partitions of a mounted disk, I've done it, it works just fine (seems odd that you can do it on a mounted disk though). I'm going to try it out later on just to be sure (the nice thing about having spare partitions).


It's the end of the world as you know it once you reboot though...


And the fun has just begun if you forget to edit your fstab and re-run lilo.

Dang, I forgot to mention that he needs to run "FDISK.EXE /MBR" to reload the DOS bootloader (to get rid of lilo)

Duh...

BTW, This also comes in handy when those new-fangled fdisk'ers don't want to allow you to change your disk type (or whatever hangup it has at the moment) during an install. Simply <CTRL><ALT>F2 and fire up fdisk and do it the old-fashioned way.

Works great


John

Quote:

___________________________________________ Windows is by far, the most used operating system with more than 100 million installations worldwide. Linux fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.

I like it

I had to try it out so I deleted two empty partitions (hdb7, hdb8) and created a new partition (hdb7) that was now the combined size of both hdb7 & 8.

When I did the "w" thing, it complained because the partition was not umounted (like you mentioned). But it did do the re-partition, running fdisk /dev/hdb the second time showed a big hdb7, and no hdb8.

I went ahead and re-partitioned it back to the way it was and presumably it is ready to go once I re-boot.


Update:

I did like you suggested and umounted the partitions that I was working with and went through the process again. Still the "device or resource busy" error.

So then I umounted the entire hdb disk and did it again. This time it sync'ed up just fine.

And /etc/mtab shows everything mounted up just fine.


Thanks, that was fun


John