I have a 30 gig drive i was using for Red Hat 9, i got a new hard drive for linux now i want to put the 30 gig back in my windows machine for addtl storage but windows no longer sees the drive. The bios knows the drive is there but windows will not show it. How do i format this sucker so i can get data on it?

what bios do you have? what win ver are you running? what file sys did you have on the drive? need a little more info?

i am running the most current release for an award bios on an asus p4b533-vm motherboard i am runing windows xp pro with ntfs filesystem.

what file sys did you have on the drive? the one that the bios sees,but, windows will not?

the 30 drive was formated with red hat 9.0 not sure what file system linux uses.

Windows ignores linux partitions.

You will need to delete the linux partitions, create new partitions for windows and then format them.

If XP's diskmanager will not let you delete the partitions then either stick the drive back in the linux box and use fdisk or cfdisk or find a copy of Windows 98 fdisk or download a 98 boot floppy utility disk from www.bootdisk.com. When running DOS fdisk select delete non-DOS partitions from the menu.

Once the partitions are deleted you can use XP's diskmanager to create new windows partitions and format them as desired.

i was told i was able to reformat directly inside windows to get the drive back to an ntfs system. does anyone know how to do this?

look one post up. xp's disk manager will show you the drive. delete the partition and format it as ntfs.

thanks for the help.. I am good to go now.

Partition Magic should do the trick too.