Un-Partitioning

Brian Sabey · 06-20-2006, 02:39 PM

I need to un - partition my hard-drive, can anyone tell me how to do this? I tried to install Linux not very successfully and now my Microsoft drive is desperately full and I may loose everything on there.

Many Thanks

pljvaldez · 06-20-2006, 03:12 PM

Not really sure what you mean by "un-partition" your drive, but I assume you have a drive something like

Code:

/dev/hda1 WinXP
/dev/hda2 /swap
/dev/hda3 /

and want to remove the linux partitions and resize the windows one to give you more space.

Anyway, I typically use GParted Live CD for all my partitioning needs. It will even allow you to resize the ntfs partition. Just download the iso and burn it to CD (remember to Burn from Disc Image or the like, not just burn the iso file to the disc as if it was data). then pop it in the CD-rom and reboot...

bernied · 06-20-2006, 03:23 PM

You can run fdisk off either a linux live-cd or from your W$ recovery CD.
Run this and use it to delete any partitions that you don't want.

Then you can either:
- create a single partition in the space you've created, then assign it a filesystem type that W$ will know (NTFS or FAT). Windows will see this as a new hard drive and may offer to format it for you the first time you try to use it (you should say yes). You can then put stuff on it.
OR
- try to resize your W$ partition to give the space back to the single partition. This is potentially more dangerous but can be done with tools like parted or qtparted, which can be found on many linux live-cds. There is also some commercial software called Partition Magic that will do this for you.

bernied · 06-20-2006, 03:29 PM

It must have taken me more than 10 minutes to write that - was watching the football.
I agree with pljvaldez - and am getting a copy of that CD for myself (it's only 30MB)

pljvaldez · 06-20-2006, 03:44 PM

One more caveat, if you're using grub right now, you might want to leave that partition on your machine as it will have the files needed to boot windows. Otherwise boot with a Dos disk or your windows CD and run fdisk /mbr or fixmbr to restore NTLDR. If you're already using NTLDR from windows, you can just nuke all the linux partitions.