I had a dual boot system ie windows/Redhat 8 but I have just been given a new system with the following specs:

Compaq Presario
Pentium 4, 2.8 GHZ
512 MB DDR ram
ATI Radeon 9200 - 128MB video memory
SpeedTouch 330 Alcatel ADSL modem
Onboard RealTeak AC'(& Audio
120GB HD.

I want to set up a dual boot on that one but from my own experience and the advice of some friends, I don't want to mess about with partitioning and stuff. I have therefore decided to add my old HD (60 GB) to my new system and install linux on that one.

I have actually added the aditional HD but from windows I can only see about 37Gb of my old HD. How do I get the rest of it back to make the total of 60 GB. I know its got something to do with partitioning.

Also this time I want to use Gentoo. Yeah I know the installation is not newbie freindly but from past experience I realise that those difficulties actually make you learn. I am willing to learn what is needed to get it installed although I may be starting from stage 2(just so i can brag ) or 3 . Hard ware wise am i likely to face any problems ?

Thanks for your anticipated help.

hmm, use ranish partition manager for you problem with your old hd..

for your Gentoo installation, go stage 3

You can also use a winblows prog called delpart.exe, put it on a windows 98 boot disk, boot to the command prompt and use it to delete those pesky XP hidden partitions. There is also a freebsd app called dd which does a great job of nuking everything on your hard drive.

I have used the delpart program to delete the linux partitions and now this is what I have:
Drive Partition Boot Size Type
1 MBR1 No 3787M Unknown
1 MBR2 Yes 45140M NTFS/HPFS
2 MBR1 Yes 37327M NTFS/HPFS

The first line which has type unknown actually holds some info that compaq put there themselves - well I deleted it and the PC would not start that is how I found out . Still when I go to windows I only see the Drive 2 with the size 37G.

What di have to do to actually see the whole 60GB in windows. I thought when I delete the partition, It will show up automatically.

Okay I have fixed it. In the end it was quite easy really. I used delpart to delete all the patitions on drive 2 then i used Fdisk ( the version that can deal with large HD) to partition the drive. I restarted Windows and formated the drive using NTFS et voila! all 60GB of it in its full glory.

Thanks Kovacs for the software - delpart - it was really easy to use.