New computer, messed up partition

[Spleen]

Well, not *new*. I bought it from a co-worker. I tried resolving this issue with him first, but he couldn't help and suggested this site, and this message board.

He was messing around with linux, and had partitioned the hard drive. He thought he deleted the linux partition before he sold it to me, but when I checked the drive space, it reports just over 6 gigs, when it's supposed to be 15 gig.

I ran fdisk, and it says there are two partitions, both dos, one primary and active, one extended. The primary is FAT32 while the other is not. There is no linux partition... apparently he tried making the hard drive whole again before he sold it to me, but didn't quite make it.
I don't know what he did, but I have no idea what to do to restore the entire hard drive.

I personally do not want to run linux, I would like to have just the one primary @ 15 gigs the way its supposed to be.

Any help would be greatly appreciated... have been trying to figure this out for weeks now.

[This message has been edited by Spleen (edited 11 November 2000).]

[CRT_Monkey]

If you or your friend has a linux disk, the best and fastest thing to do is use the Linux disk to make one big Linux partition. During the install, you can create one Linux partition, write it to disk, and then quit the install. reboot from cdrom with windows disk in cd tray. Use windoze fdisk to delete non-dos partition and create Primary dos partition. Then you should be good to go.

Windows fdisk is really kinda crappy when it comes to handling the HD, IMHO. but the Linux version of fdisk doesn seem to care what's on your hard drive. It does what you tell it do. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

[Spleen]

eek! What you're saying is that I have to re-install everything after the linux partitioning? That's not good news. He left some choice programs on the computer for me (on the primary), and I hate to lose those... any other way to do this?

Thanks

[CRT_Monkey]

..I'm assuming of course that windows fdisk is not letting you delete the partition/s for some reason.

[Spleen]

I haven't tried deleting the secondary partition because I didn't think that would do my any good. What I would like to do is just resize the primary to the full 15 gigs... tho I suppose I'd have to delete the other first? Anyway, windows fdisk doesn't give you an option to resize partitions.

Thanks

[CRT_Monkey]

Are these programs re-installable? If not, and you want to keep them, you might try some other partitioning software like Partition Magic to re-size the existing partition and delete the unwanted one. Only idea I have.

Personally, I'd go for the whole enchilada and blast everything away and start fresh. But that's just the way I like to do things.

Yes the only real (semi-safe) way to keep the data and resize the partition is with 3rd party software like Partition magic.

[CRT_Monkey]

Oops, or you could just delete the unwanted partition and create a second primary dos partition which would end up being your D: drive and cd would be moved to E:

I think that would work.

[Spleen]

Okay... sounds logical. I'll give it a whirl!

Thanks

[ph34r]

Get a single floppy distro like HAL91 and boot with that.

Then run fdisk /dev/hda
Then delete all the partitions.

Then boot with Windows boot disk, run fdisk, create a nice big fat32 partition, format it, and install Windows.


And, in a few years, when you want to run Linux, come on back http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif