I have a PC with two hard drives. The first drive was Windows XP and the secondary was just a storage drive.

I installed Red Hat 9 on the primary drive, and didn't think that RH would also take the secondary drive. (Maybe I was asleep during that part of the install).

My question is, Is it possible to remove the Linux partition from the secondary drive and restore the Windows partition? I have not saved anything to the secondary drive since the RH install.

The files that were on the secondary drive are not critical, just desirable.

Thanks, for any suggestions

Did you mean that RH9 claimed all of your second harddrive or just part of it? I also use RH9 and have several hard drives. What happens when you use this command:

df

The above command should show you which partitions RH9 is currently using. However, it will only show you the partitions that RH9 currently has mounted, it will not show you all the partitons that exist. You could also try using the command below to find all of the partitions that exist on your second hard drive. Before doing that either use the su command to get superuser priveleges or log in as root. That is a lower case L in the command by the way and not the number 1. Use a lower case l.

/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdb -l

Remember that the above command as given would only show the partitions on your second hard drive. When I have installed RH9 or other versions of RH I have never let it do the partitioning automatically. I prefer to choose the custom installation option and then use the Disk Druid option for partitioning. I have never liked the idea of automatic partitioning (perhaps it is ok?). The RH installation program also has an option to use fdisk for partitioning. I used that once with RH 7.3. I prefer the Disk Druid option because it seems more user friendly.

I want to make sure we correctly understand your current configuration before any of us suggest what to do.

PS, on second thought do not use the above fdisk command. When I tried that just now it not only gave the the information I wanted but it also announced this;

Warning: deleting partitions after 16

Fortunately, there is not anything important beyond partion 16 on my second hard drive. They are several almost empty partions that only have backup of data that exists on other partions. Obviously I am not an expert an using fdisk. I generally try to avoid using it and mostly use other software such as Partiton Magic and Disk Druid instead for partition. Can someone who knows more about fdisk please explain what I did wrong in the above command?

Well I rebooted and used had Partition Magic to view all my partitons. All of my important partitons are still there. Whatever was above partiton 16 was not important. I tested all of the copies of Linux that are on my second hard drive and they boot up ok and all data seems to be there.

I do not mean to steal your thread so, I will probably post my questions and problems with fdisk in a new conversation. So anyway everthing was ok but I believe fdisk did delete an unimportant partition or two.

Here's the info from RH:

[root@localhost root]# mount
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)


[root@localhost root]# more /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

[root@localhost root]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 36G 1.9G 32G 6% /
/dev/hda1 99M 9.2M 85M 10% /boot
none 251M 0 251M 0% /dev/shm

When I look in the hardware browser in RH, under the hard drive section,
I see info on both hard drives. The secondary hard drive shows this:

/dev/hdd
Start End
1 19852 Free Space

If the 2nd drive is formated NTFS then that is probably why RH doesn't see it correctly. RH does not include NTFS support in its default kernel. To add support search the site for links to sourceforge's web site.

Try using fdisk to see as suggested above. You probably don't have 16 partitions on the drive anyway.

To be more specific, I have a 'removable' primary hdd, so I have a tray with a WinXP drive and another tray with RH9 drive.

I want the secondary drive to be able to be visible when I have the WinXP drive in. Currently, when I boot with the XP drive, it doesn't see the secondary drive.

My task is to get the secondary drive back in service for XP and not lose any of the files that were on it.

Thanks again.

So you have a total of 3 drives? You can use diskmanager in XP to view the other drives partition info.