Formatting Existing Partition?

aquiferous · 01-27-2005, 05:19 PM

I'm trying to install Slackware 10.0 and want to format an existing NTFS partition to ex2 to use without wiping the rest of the drive (the partition is 6GB on a 60GB drive). Is there any way I can do this with software or can I do it through Slackware, and if the latter, can someone explain how? Thanks!

jlinkels · 01-27-2005, 05:29 PM

First discover the name of the file system (/dev/hda3, /dev/hda4...)

You can also do

cfdisk /dev/hda

assuming the NTFS partition is on /dev/hda

Once in cfdisk, you can look at the table what the name of the NTFS file system is. DO NOT WRITE TO DISK WHEN EXITING cfdisk.

After you are __sure__ which is the NTFS partition, do

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda3

or whatever your partition file system name is.

I recommend using ext3 instead of ext2

jlinkels