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No more CentOS...
Hello,
Long story short I need to uninstall CentOS, and install Windows (Dont hurt me)... Windows dosent seem to want to install so long as I have a Linux part. on my primary drive, and I dont want to buy a new drive, or reformat my slave... I dont have a floppy drive/cable avaible currently... Can I use a Live CD of something like Slax, to run the OS from the CD and RAM, then from within the temp OS just reformat? I assume a magnet would be a bad idea... Thoughts? |
You can reformatt with Knoppix I know, probably from most live CD's. If you want to go part way through the install process the Ubuntu live cd will partition your drive however you want it to. If you need detailed Knoppix instructions just let me know, it's not hard.
Best of luck... David |
Indeed a magnet is a show of poor planning.
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Hello,
Do you know what size media I will need? Looks like the .ISO for Knoppix is 716MB, and I dont think that will fit on a 700MB CD... And I dont know if a .ISO will extract properly on a DVD RAM disk... Still have some time before the DL finishes... -Isaac |
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Windoze merely requires a primary partition for the boot code - and it needs to be a 'doze format. Create a primary (doesn't have to be big), and you can install the rest to a logical, or another disk. |
The sure-fire way to get Windows to install cleanly will be to "wipe" the disk---use something like DBAN. (Available at Sourceforge or on the Ultimate Boot CD)
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ubuntu or kubuntu fit in one CD, comes with a partitioning tool.
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If you want to dual boot Windows and Linux, install Windows first. The Windows installer often doesn't play nice with other OSes installed on the system - it usually just wipes them in my experience, although that information is quite old now (win98!). Perhaps more modern Windows installers are less violent. I still hear people complaining that after installing modern Windows their boot loader has been killed or broken.
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The newer the version of Windows, the more viciously it tries to overwrite any non-Windows bootloaders.
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On a side note I just installed Windows 2003 Server R2 on a machine this week. The OS refused to install until I had created partitions on Every drive in the system that it could recognize.. Definitely a new behavior that I have not seen before. I split the main drive into two partitions and ignored the second HD in the system. I selected the First partition on the first drive and hit install and windows threw an error that it ABSOLUTELY HAD TO write files to the slave drive so it could be recognized and the only way to accomplish this was to partition the drive.
SO when I completed partitioning everything it then wanted to install to F: the first partition on the Adaptec SCSI RAID controller.. **sigh** F: ?? wtf ? I really really hate windows more and more.. but it sure is job security since it will never stop breaking. |
Hello,
Ok, I have Knoppix, so how do I reformat the drive? |
The simplest way would be to use qtparted. You can find it in the system menu. If don't mind the command line you could use fdisk.
Let me know if you need more detailed instructions. David P.S. If you run into trouble, qtparted might require that the disk you are reformating isn't mounted when you reformat. Check, if it gives busy errors, then you might want to boot knoppix with the noswap option (I think it is) as if there is a swap partition on that drive knoppix might be using it. |
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If you want to install Centos, or another version of Linux, simply use the partition tool on the installer to partition the drive. Personally, when I dual booted, I always just had an extra hard drive laying around for Linux installs. 80gig IDE hard drives can be had online for around 50 bucks, and thats more than enough for a Linux OS. IGF |
Hello,
Well I got the dreaded Windows back on my box... Think I'll head over to Newegg and pikcup a hard drive, so I can avoid this in the future... Thank-you everyone...! |
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