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-   -   Nuking partitions and starting over again (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/nuking-partitions-and-starting-over-again-512142/)

gloomz 12-19-2006 11:57 PM

Nuking partitions and starting over again
 
I have for some reason, tons of partitions taking up tons of space.

I have a 20gig hdd divided into like 8 or so partitions.

The one that I install DSL linux on, has less than 200mb, and is now filled up.

FDISK is confusing, and the tutorials for fdisk on the net suck.

I don't know how to delete things, and I can't download anything because of my hdd space.

I just need a way where I can nuke everything and have one partition, and have DSL linux on that one partition.

Norton Partition magic was easy enough when I used it on windows 98, so I tried to nuke dsl and go back to windows 98, but it gave me errors when I tried to format the drive.

So now I'm stuck... any ideas?

sn68 12-20-2006 12:30 AM

Use gparted liveCD http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Electro 12-20-2006 12:36 AM

The developers of fdisk recommends cfdisk to be used first. Try using cfdisk. After you deleted and make the partitions, type hdparm -z /dev/hda assuming /dev/hda is the drive that you recently created the partitions.

Partition Magic is a great utility to resize and split partitions, but I do not recommend using it to create partitions and formatting them. The best tools to use for creating partitions is the utilities that comes with the OS.

pixellany 12-20-2006 12:49 PM

Most Linux installers will give you the option of taking over the whole disk.
But then you say something about going back to Windows 98.....

How exactly do you want to have things setup?

gloomz 12-21-2006 12:12 PM

Well DSL linux doesn't have the option of taking over the disk, so I think that's where thinks get messed up.

All I really want is to be able to use all 20gigs for one OS. I don't want to dual boot.

And I don't want a bunch of partitions floating around.

I also want to be able to uninstall DSL linux and go back and install windows 98 again, and vice versa.

The error I got in fdisk when I went fdisk /dev/hda was

"no valid partition tables"

I think i'm in trouble...

gloomz 12-21-2006 01:41 PM

that gparted live cd looks fantastic.

Unfortunately I don't think it will work, because the computer that has the partition tables messed up, is an older one.

Sigh...

JimBass 12-21-2006 07:18 PM

You're not in trouble at all. Unless the drive is physically damaged, any install disk can blank the partition table and create its own. It will probably warn you like 4 times that you will lose all data on the disk, but that is exactly what you want to do! Just toss the qtpared disk in, and blank the whole disk. Then install DSL.

Peace,
JimBass

gloomz 12-22-2006 11:51 AM

I did try the gpart live cd just to make sure that it didn't work, and it did work!

There were quite a few errors I had to fix, but it was soo easy to fix em.

Thanks a ton guys.


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