hi folks,

I thought I knew how to do this, but after thinking about it for several nights, its more tricky than I thought. Heres my partion table now:


Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 swap
/dev/sdb2 63013348 9867152 49945248 17% /
/dev/sdb3 50394996 47674508 160532 100% /home

/dev/sda1 9992396 4521596 5470800 46% /media/disk

I have grub on this lot, for when I wanted to use windows. So when I installed windows, It had to be first. Then I put linux on.

So how would I go about removing windows, it will be ext3, and munted as /home/ftp , yep, thats where all the space has gone!

And reconfiguring grub, to auto start linux?

Must admit I don't understand your angst.
Removing Windoze will be easy - mkfs.ext3; if you want to be neat about it, also change the partition id from 0x07 to 0x83 but it isn't absolutely necessary.
For grub, simply change the default line - delete the (Windoze) stanza altogether wuld make sense.
(an "fdisk -l" listing would have been more useful)

there you go:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1244 9992398+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0001c8f3

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 14345 14593 2000092+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 1 7970 64018993+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 7971 14344 51199155 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

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it's the grub bit I'm concerned about,

The windows partition is irrelevant to a standard grub install. Grub may be in the MBR of that disk, but that isn't within any partition - Windoze, Linux or otherwise.

To reformat your windows partition you can use mkfs.ext3, or mke2fs -j. You might want to check the -m option and set it to zero, since this device is going to serve as storage only. The drive seems to be /dev/sda1

To "fix" grub, you edit /boot/grub/grub.conf (or menu.lst) you can delete the windows section altogether, then set the "default" line to whatever entry you want to be the default. The count starts in zero, not 1.

To make that drive to mount permanently in /home/ftp, you need to add a line like this to your fstab:

You can try playing with umask to get different permissions. "auto" can be changed by either ntfs or ntfs-3g. ntfs comes with the stock kernel, it doesn't have write support except for very minimal capabilities. ntfs3g is a 3rd party driver that has full r/w support, you need to install it separately if your OS don't bundle it by default.

Oh yeah, mbr is not in a partion , duh!

ok cheers

I would also recommend altering the partition type via fdisk; it'll save confusion later.