Right now i have XP loaded on one HDD and RH9 on another. I wont to remove RH9 and be able to use that HDD for XP again. How do I do it?

you can do it with your XP cd, and the utilities on there. You could also Boot linux and use fdisk to change the partition type and write that to the disk then XP would see it and let you format the drive

Control Panel=>Administrative Tools=>Computer Management=>Disk Management.

Format the RH9 partition. You could also do this with a partitioning tool such as Partition Magic, if you have it.

Then reboot with the XP CD in the CD-ROM drive, go to the Recovery Console, log in as Administrator, and type "fixmbr" (without the quotes). This will restore the Windows bootloader.

Not sure the mbr would be broken on the second hard drive, but that also sounds like it will help you to format the linux partitions

i cant do it through windows cause it wont see the drive

Dear Jumpman,

Windows might not see your hard drive but you can go to Tucows and download a freeware program called Swiss Army Knife from the disc utilities section and it will see the other hard drive and format it if that is what you want to do. You could also go to Seagate's web site and download their Disc Wizard to do the same thing.

i cant find Swiss Army Knife at Tucows

Jumpman,

Go to www.tucows.com....then to windows.....to system and utilities....click on HD utilities and CompuApps Swiss Knife should be there. Trust me it will see your Linux HD. Disc Wizard which can be downloaded at Seagate is good too.

Hope I helped.

Serrano

Unless RH9 was specifically instructed to install GRUB to the RH9 root partition, and jumpman890 transferred the RH9 boot sector to the Windows boot sector so that RH9 could be called from the Windows bootloader-- which are 1) not the default behaviour of the RH9 installer and 2) unlikely actions for a new user, which it would appear that jumpman890 is-- the system is using GRUB on the MBR as its first-stage bootloader. That won't be affected by deleting the RH9 partition, but the second-stage bootloader will be erased. So there will be no menu (as the menu configuration was on the erased partition), and no way for GRUB to know where Windows is in order to boot it.

This is why the Windows bootloader would need to be reinstalled.

Oh, and sorry, jumpman890-- my Win2KSP4 does see the "alien" partitions, iirc; it just gives me no options of what to do but to format or delete them. Since that's what you wanted to do anyway, it wouldn't have mattered.

Maybe XP is different in that respect. The trial versions of Swiss Army Knife (available at http://www.compuapps.com/Download/sw...swissknife.htm), or its big brother, Drive Wizard (available at http://www.compuapps.com/Products/drivewiz/drivewiz.htm) should solve this problem. You could also try a demo version of Partition Commander (http://www.partition-manager.com/), or the completely free Partition Manager (http://www.ranish.com/part/)-- however Partition Manager does not resize NTFS partitions (which is what XP is likely installed to), so you would be unable to merge the newly free space with any existing partitions using that tool.

Last but not least, you could always use RedHat's own tools to delete the partition. Here's the way that's done (I've done this under Mandrake, and there's no reason why it shouldn't work under RH as well).

Boot from the RedHat CD1. If there are repair tools available from the boot menu, you can check them out to see if one of them is cfdisk, and if so, then just use that to delete the partition and write the new partition table, reboot, stick the XP CD in real fast and then boot to the XP Recovery Console and use fixmbr. You can then boot into Windows normally and do whatever you like with the newly-freed space.

If cfdisk is not available from the RH repair console, just go through the install to the partitioning process. You certainly will get cfdisk here, so use it to delete the current RH partition, write the new partition table, then reset your computer (with the button on the front), again, switch CDs real fast (or go to the BIOS so you have time to switch them slowly ), then as before, boot to the XP Recovery Console and use fixmbr to replace the RH bootloader with the Windows bootloader. You can then use the standard Windows tools to format the free space (from the deleted partition) to either a new partition, or to expand a currently-existing partition.

Hope this helps.

i downloaded Swiss Army Knife from Tucows and it still wont see my hdd. is there anything else i can do?

surely using a win98 bootdisk you can use the fdisk utility ?
they should show up as Non-Dos partitions ....
and follow the menu to select "remove non-dos" partition ...
then partition with either fat32 or ntfs, and xp will then be able to see it ..

Dear Jumpman

Just for grins I left my Linux OS and went to XP and ran the Swiss Knife utility. It saw my Linux HD as the master slave and even named it as being an IBM DPTA and this was running under XP. Of course, when I went to " MY COMPUTER" XP did not ackowledge that there was another HD. I have never had this utility or Seagate's utility fail to see a HD. You might need to go back to point zero and make certin that your BIOS is picking up the HD and if you have been tinkering it might be a good idea to make certain that your connections are good to the HD. More than once in my career of tinkering I have found something really basic to be the problem and felt foolish afterwards.

A good idea for this is to just go ahead and leave Linux on the drive since it's the best. That way you don't have to ask these types of questions. lol